tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14221043335806239632017-07-17T12:31:29.142-07:00Humanity's To-Do ListKendall Meadenoreply@blogger.comBlogger21125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-1616685175778345512017-07-17T12:31:00.001-07:002017-07-17T12:31:29.158-07:00First Unified Church of Knowledgeable Independent Nonpartisan AtheistsThis is a throwaway post, to create a troll religion/philosophy/life system.&nbsp; I do not practice or endorse tax evasion, this is not advocating tax evasion, it is a jab at the tax-free nature of religion in much of the world, despite it being a total waste of time; everything's a total waste of time ultimately, but you might as well have as good a time as you can and help everyone else do the same as you are able, and be grateful for everything that you get, because if you're still getting shit, you're still alive, and you might not be.<br /><br />Here are the Bullet-Pointed Core Tenets:<br /><br /><ul><li><u><i><b>This is not a belief. The most basic tenet of F.U.C.K.I.N-A. is that "Belief", or "Holding something as true without or in spite of evidence" is philosophically invalid</b></i></u>, and as a concept is useless for pursuing what is true (because what is true remains true in spite of belief, and belief of a thing that is not true is itself the barrier to seeing what is actually true, so in the best case the belief is useless if you have the knowledge and premature if you don't).&nbsp; <br /><br />However as a corollary, compassion for believers is mandatory. It must be acknowledged, even if you do not have the experience of it, that other people are attempting to accurately represent the ideas they want you to respond to, and some of those are about religious experience and unshakeable convictions; it may be the case that some of us cannot get past these, and that means we cannot condemn each other for what may or may not be our very natures.&nbsp; Maybe cats play with their food and dogs with sticks and humans with ideas of humans, just as an instinctual behavior, like smelling your finger after you scratch your ass, just in case it smells like something other than ass.<br /><br />And this does not deny that humans operate on models of the world that our brains understand: but to claim that every model is somehow "true for each of us" is nonsense, or it means "true" is a nonsense idea that we can't use to communicate meaningfully.&nbsp; Reality is that which continues to be the case despite belief, hope, or other aspiration.<br /><br />And because of the social utility of beliefs for organizing humans, they're probably an evolved trait we couldn't be here without- Believing let a brain "know" a thing without having to spend the calories to learn it.</li><li><u><i><b>We've all only got one shot at this life, so don't fuck it up for yourself or others.</b></i></u> This should be obvious, but since it sometimes isn't, then here's the bar: If you take away somebody else's happiness, health, or capacity to make decisions, you're an asshole.&nbsp; If you take this away because the act of taking it is enjoyable to you, the human species is better off without you as a member no matter what else.&nbsp; If you are willing to take away happiness, health, or freedom, over evidences you have not verified, you are part of the problem. If you take away these things on accident while acting rationally in the interests of yourself or on behalf of others, you have been un-cautious and imprudent, but you are fundamentally forgiveable- but the situation you have created must be dealt with, and as the uncautious one who caused it, you are responsible to do what you can.&nbsp; <b>Without injuring, causing sadness or pain, or removing the ability to make a decision about their own actions, you have not wronged anyone.</b>&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><ul><li>You fundamentally cannot be responsible for actions you did not take; however, taking the action of driving someone to a decision that affects their moral outcomes is an action for which you are responsible.&nbsp; Convincing someone to commit suicide is and can only be complicity and partial responsibility for the needless taking of a life, for example. </li><li>The ability of somebody else to feel offended by your actions is not an injury to them: it is silly for anyone to feel offended by your happiness unless it is built on their back and without acknowledging their contribution.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>However, the psychology of humans demanding social acknowledgement is well documented and should be accounted for, and so causing others to self-inflict misery is less desirable than leaving them satisfied and the social transactions completed and reciprocated, even if only symbolically. "Happiness" is one of the criterion, remember.</li><li>Basically, pay your dues, don't step on toes you don't have to, apologize when you do step on toes or can't pay your dues, thank those who help you, return any evil you receive to the original sender, without forwarding it on to anyone else, and don't expect anything- good or bad. <br /> </li></ul><li><b>Nobody owes you anything.</b> There is no reason that the universe might be obligated to make sense to you: be receptive to change.&nbsp; Look for ways that you are wrong, and look for opportunities to correct yourself and lead into greater accuracy of information; don't expect anybody to spoonfeed it to you. Count how many meals it would take you to starve to death, and look at the sun, and try to remember you're on a rock swinging around it on a permanent gravity rocket at thousands of miles per hour, and the rock's mostly wet and covered with green fuzz called 'vegetation', and that you're (probably) a species of speck that thinks it's tough shit because it moved from high up on the green fuzz to low down on the flat green fuzz that's smaller than it, and remember that if something big just goes close to the small rock you're rocketing on, it'll fuck up the orbit of our rock-rocket and fling us off into space or forward into the sun, or into another planet. Or it might fling some fraction of the astroid belt in at us, leaving earth orbiting where it is, with its' surface scoured of all life- and we wouldn't even leave footprints, the way the dinosaurs did, if that happened.</li><li><b>Everything everyone can do is possible. </b>Nuclear weapons and rockets to the moon and the internet are all science fiction- hell, radios and airplanes, and gas engines small enough to be mobile, and machines accurate enough to produce reliably interchangeable parts- all of this was fucking pipe dreams until it was built.&nbsp; It was built by people like you, virtually all of it was built by people who knew less than you know now.&nbsp; Stop waiting for somebody to give you permission; stop waiting for the fear of failure to go away. You get one life to do these things, one chance to be the change you want to see. Get off your fucking ass and do it.</li><li><b>Healthy minds live in healthy bodies</b>.&nbsp; Since "Health, happiness, and capacity to make decisions" are the criteria for morality, promoting good health, or at least not discouraging it, is mandatory.&nbsp; At the time of this writing, the chronic obesity epidemic of which I am a part has generated a "body acceptance" movement which stretches the decent bounds of the reasonable imagination and demands that everybody find all body types attractive.&nbsp; I won't say that opposing this idea means that everybody should be free to shame and humiliate everyone else; but the notion that you must go beyond accepting a person despite their challenges and love the things they struggle with about them seems as ridiculous as loving the heroin about a junkie. So a rejection of this movement and abstaining from joining in it isn't a condemnation of anybody's physical condition so much as it is a call to to action for us all to be better than we were yesterday, and to help and encourage others to do the same.</li><li><b>Your Soul is made of Legos.</b>&nbsp; We regard consciousness as being constructed of various functional interchangeable variously configurable parts; the number and complexity of these parts, be they pertaining to memory ("remembering"), processing and extrapolation (or "thought"), and given the logistics of supporting these functions in biology, and our understanding of that biology with processes like evolution via various forms of natural selection, such as social selection and sex selection and so on, it is probably the case that what free will we have is extremely limited and perhaps even quantifiable as a product of the extent of available points at which the system of these parts allow us to recognize novel opportunities.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><ul><li>Since there are so many factors in the formation of these 'lego bricks of the soul', and since there are so many theologies that demand an accounting for some or other various aspect of a central experience that their theology is based around, here is that accounting; there are parts of the soul, parts of the brain, that affect our experience but are not rational; we are all familiar with the emotional depth of dreams, the real horror that is felt in a nightmare, where we might say "the lego brick controlling the experience of fear was active"- whether that manifests as the release of some neurotransmitter, or some primordial part of the amygdala being triggered harmlessly- the necessary and compulsive occasional firing required of a healthy neuron, in a time when your body is decoupled from being affected by the instinct.&nbsp; The "lego brick" model intentionally decouples the 'bricking' of the function, the perceived fear in this case, from the 'bricking' of the physical form that takes in the brain.&nbsp;</li><li>&nbsp;So with this understanding, and the inter-connection of the 'bricks' that is the inter-connectedness of the brain, it is not hard to see how there might be bricks in 'cul de sacs' where there is an experience from a brick not available from a rational path; it may be the case that a social experience like Baptism really does induce a euphoric state, or Nirvana may be a real experience; it seems to beyond the realm of quantifiability at this point, but this is a model that would account for these things in a way that does not contradict the rational functioning of the rest of the brain, while also explaining how drugs might be able to induce the same experiences, how brain injuries may change experience, the potential for near-death experience, and the potential for other physical interventions to have effects- positive and negative.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>In this view, a sociopath might be regarded as having a deficiency of 'empathy legos', a kind of 'moral color-blindness', while somebody with too many of such legos as these might exhibit borderline personality disorder, intense empathetic social commitment at the expense of a meaningful grip on reality; somebody with insufficient 'attentive short term memory allocation' blocks might be described as having ADHD, whereas somebody with an excess of these blocks to the extent that they generate false positives in pattern recognition might be described as having Schizophrenia.&nbsp;</li><li>The potential for the social activation and deactivation of these pathways means that the accounting for human behavior cannot make assumptions about the availability of any of these bricks at any given time for any given task, no matter how basic.&nbsp; History is rife with examples of moralized ethnic cleansing that are justified on the basis of demonizing the other and then sweeping in to "clean up the problem".&nbsp; It is as prominent in our histories in the Biblical treatment of the Amalekites as it was, subsequently, of the tribes that vanquished them, on the basis of subsequent iterations of their mythologies and subsequent transmissions of the same sort of racial supremacism.&nbsp; This is not contrary to human nature, and this inner darkness, this will to survive even at the expense of others, the resolve to kill, should not be regarded as foreign to the human experience, even if some individuals are fortunate enough to never have had to experience any aspect of these biological imperatives. So while the tolerance or forgiveness of any crime is not commanded or condoned, empathy, seeing the situation that caused the criminal to commit the crime, is mandatory to the extent that it is possible to empathize, on the condition that seeking empathy with the criminal not cost the empathizer their own mental well-being unduly.</li><li>It is not asserted that this is the mechanistic relationship between all of these- simply that this has served as a useful model to account for the behavior of many people in a wide variety of circumstances.</li></ul><li><b>Anything in this that is Mistaken, Factually wrong, a misrepresentation, or otherwise an inaccurate representation of reality should be replaced with something better as soon as the improvement is available, and a review should be conducted once annually, called "FucksGiving"</b> This review holiday is a scientific "Festival of Lights".&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><ul><li>There should be a functioning working telescope and or microscope capable of seeing either the moons of Jupiter or a single celled organism, as the functional test, which should be decorated and the gifts exchanged placed under it in a central area of the house, to be opened on "FucksGiving Day".&nbsp;</li><li>FucksGiving is a day where every stony wild-ass idea, every brain fart, every cult mythology, every creed and precept, should be represented as accurately as possible, for a whole 24 hour day.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>These stony wild ass-ideas should be represented by increasingly inebriated consenting informed adults wearing as little clothing as possible, with feasting and merrymaking, playing hilarious pranks, magic tricks and mind games, games of skill and knowledge like chess, and of making the most of chance, like Black Jack, brain sports like jujitsu, HEMA, push hands, and everyone should participate giving kids candy for performing clever tricks, building neat things, and participating in the festivities.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Part of the intent is deliberate debauchery, but part of it is to pit every idea against each other in a gruelling deathmatch that reminds us how and why the winners won and allows new challengers to potentially best them.&nbsp; At the end of the night, after 24 hours of ridicule, the defendants of the various ideas don't have to pretend to take them seriously anymore, but in the interest of maintaining a diversity of representation, it should be up to everyone to pick an idea that they disagree with and try to see why others might take it so seriously that they would devote their lives or their deaths or the lives or deaths of others to it.</li><li>Since so many people are representing ideas not their own on this day, nobody should take any remark personally and everybody should get a pass and be forgiven for any stupid shit they said while under the influence of a chemical that incapacitated them.&nbsp; For one day, everybody gets a pass and the people that love each other can go get something out of their system.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>In honor of the first ever non-religious nation in the known history of the Human Species, this day should be celebrated on the nearest approximate calculation of July 4, and in the spirit of the event, Fucks-Givers should wish each other well by saying "May the Fourth be with you" to each other.&nbsp;</li><li>In the interests of safety, there should be medics, trip sitters, and designated drivers, as appropriate and available.</li></ul><li><b>FUCKIN-Atheists are called upon to provide a repository of all cultural outputs, no matter the origin; all works of literature, music, art, poetry, even recent media like games, movies, recordings, remixes, and podcasts, should all be mirrored and archived and kept in a searchable recoverable long-lasting encryptable digital format, with what hard copies can be recorded also archived in visit-able libraries that also function as museums.&nbsp; </b>Since there are language barriers and practical logistical hurdles to this, it is recommended that a blockchain of all cultural additions be created and added to by as widely distributed of a network as possible to secure this beyond the bounds of any inevitable attempt at censorship.<b>&nbsp;</b> </li><li><b>As "Churches" are in this epoch of history still legally protected tax-exempt mythological institutions pretending to advocate philanthropy, and since the total moral failure of all available world religions has set this bar so low, 10% of the disposable income a FUCKIN-Atheist has on them at any meeting should be allocated to a collective R&amp;D budget, to be awarded to anyone but themselves for the purposes of encouraging any project that moves the human species forward to a point where more of us are free from obligatory meaningless drudgery.</b> of highest priority are items allowing the total pragmatic independence of every human from every other- it should not be up to any of us to rely on others for food, energy, shelter, clothing, tools, or knowledge- societies have historically proven to be such one sided self-defeating transmitters of these, unable to overcome the problems of selection bias, part of the premise of FUCKIN-Atheism is to deliberately create and participate in a vehicle capable of transmitting culture beyond the time scale of a human life, and in the interests of this, 10% of the available disposable money in any congregation of FUCKIN-Atheists, no matter how small that pot is, should be divided among developments that have been conceptualized and need prototyping to achieve an implementation with a positive impact on human happiness and well-being.</li><li><b>Since this is a philanthropic and cultural enterprise, this should be tax-exempt too by the same merits, yet it is probably inevitably the circumstance that the insecurities of the dominant cults, facing the prospect of cultural obsolescence, will resist this, which is a circumstance that must be endured and acknowledged in order to be faced and overcome.</b>&nbsp; Success is not guaranteed, and opportunities must be taken where they are found.</li></ul>That's it, an atheist's "religion for human improvement and against faith and other mind-manacles".<br /><ul></ul>Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-78130549015735307812017-06-09T11:56:00.000-07:002017-06-09T11:56:00.852-07:00Raspberry Pi ProjectsSo, I've recently had a crash-course through dealing with Raspberry Pi hardware, linux programming, motor programming, and now that I've gotten my feet wet and a taste for this, nothing is going to fucking stop me from continuing with shit I know I can do.<br /><br />So, what all am I working on?<br /><ul><li>Drones</li><li>Cameras</li><li> Sex Toys</li><li> Fireworks</li><li> Smart House Modules</li><li> Electric Vehicle Platform</li><li> Night Vision Goggles</li></ul><h4>Drones</h4>There are a number of open-source modules on the internet that I'm currently researching.&nbsp; I have a picture in my head of a medium-range VTOL type drone... actually I've got a substantial repository of my own designs I'll be pursuing in this regard eventually, but for now, the primary development centers around the raspberry pi zero and the ardupilot board to make a small nimble drone capable of carrying a camera.<br /><br />No current participants- this is an area of research. <br /><h4>Camera Turrets</h4>This is a project&nbsp; to make a general purpose robotic camera.&nbsp; A fully developed feature set will include google earth placement integration (so the cam knows where it is and where it's pointing), object tracking, panorama shots, and it can do things like patrol a perimeter and track who's what and when's where.<br /><br />No current participants, but this is an active area of development of mine personally.<br /><h4> Sex Toys</h4>Because why not? This began as a conversational joke that quickly grew out of control when I realized how easy it is to make sex toys better than 99% of the ones on the market using off-the-shelf components.&nbsp; The idea for this is two devices, roughly a fleshlight-type pocket pussy thing with a plastic sleeve around the outside&nbsp; that manipulates it on the user; then there is a correlating version that is essentially a fleshlight-sized tube, out of which a dildo emerges and retracts, so it's basically a very small tame version of the terrifying exercise bike thing you'll find if you google "fucking machine" and click on the image tab.<br /><br />The end goal of this is basically sex online, and having sex over a wifi network actually allows for some really cool possibilities.&nbsp; For example, men and women may have different sexual rhythms, and having two machines work independently means that both partners can have totally different sex- she can go fast and he can go slow- and their responses can be more or less 'steered' by the output, ie, how fast or slow the thing runs, temperature and vibration settings, things like that- which means that there is the romantic possibility of getting two people who love each other but have some mismatch or other to finally come together, even far apart.<br /><br />Then there's the possibility of running simulation games- pair this with an occulus rift for example, and suddenly you don't *JUST* have sex online available to anyone with (probably) $100, and not only that- with off the shelf components that can't be regulated as sex toys, which allows this to circumvent all sorts of idiot "moral" authorities in places like Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Thailand. Y'all obsolete motherfuckers can go fuck yourselves, and I'll help, and hopefully real governments can emerge in these countries.<br /><br />There is currently one podcast participant who's collaborating on this.<br /><h4> Fireworks</h4>This is another "wow wouldn't it be cool if..." conversation that gave me the idea.&nbsp; Essentially, it comes down to a grid of connections between a positive and negative rail, so that you can literally address the fireworks and send them off individually with a small capacitor bank and alligator clips on the normal fuses (which lets them fall off when the fuse ignites). The basic premise, from my non-electrical-engineer outsider perspective, remembering that electricity is a bit like water in a pipe, but the pipe is solid, so it's kind of like a stack that electrons are popped into one end of and out the other end of, like a newton's cradle, and the progress from the source of the current to the ground- so the idea is to use the pi to send a control signal to a chip that is turning on and off the circuits between ground, or the negative pole absent that.&nbsp; Maybe this will require two chips, one for positive and one for negative? I will have to do more research and push this along, but the rough idea is to use a 12 v battery as the current source to set off the fuses.<br /><br />As stated, there is a podcast participant also collaborating on this.<br /><h4> Smart House modules</h4>This is a set of features to control lights, door locks, a house wifi network and media storage, and other basic commodity functions. <br /><br />Currently there is one podcast collaborator and others possibly interested.<br /><h4> Electric Vehicle Platform</h4>This is a basic controller platform for general use in controlling high-power motors and input and output motor circuits for applications like electric cars and motorcycles, ebikes, segways, hoverboards, and so on. <br /><br />Currently there is one podcast participant actively researching and collaborating on this- more to come.<br /><h4> Night Vision Goggles</h4><br />This is a project to take 3 primary sets of graphics visualization- a pair conventional wide-angle cameras with the wide spectrum (infrared and UV) filters removed or replaced, a thermal infrared camera, and a small passive/active radar pinhole camera that can pick up and graphically represent the location of a radio source on a field of view, which is kind of like the splinter cell EMF vision, and it can also activate a flash of electrons and see the response, allowing relatively low resolution 3d mapping of stuff in front of you by reactive hardness- so glass will be non-responsive, metal will reflect greatly, different plastics have different characteristics, etc.&nbsp; The wide angle wide spectrum cameras already exist, the thermal camera already exists, the radar modules exist but have not to my knowledge been assembled into <br /><br /><br /><br /><a name='more'></a><br /><br />So, that's a rough overview of the pi projects I'm planning for the future- it is <b>not</b> a complete list, the one I'm working on today for example is a toy for babies that is based on using a raspberry pi to control a TV with a normal remote control so that a kid can safely play with a controlled set of the TV functionality with a cheaply replaceable remote control that won't be such a loss if it is destroyed by slobber, and I've got some green energy and waste processing stuff that I think will be game-changing that is also going to be based on the pis, but these are detailed separately elsewhere, including the post on the sun-tracking steam turbine here.<br />Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-54531296341971627442017-06-08T00:02:00.002-07:002017-06-10T13:54:23.861-07:00The Dadiot YouPodTubeCast!I'm starting a youpodtubecast! Currently, the audio is hosted <a href="https://soundcloud.com/choscura/sets/dadiot">here</a>, where I've got up the first chapter of one of my favorite books on politics, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Obedience-Discourse-Voluntary-Servitude/dp/1610161238/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1496902219&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=the+politics+of+obedience">The Politics of Obedience</a> (mostly a placeholder, but I do want to record audiobooks of my favorite obscure books), and I want to make other resources available too.<br /><br />So, what is the premise, what sort of thing will I be doing?<br /><br /><b>First and foremost, I want to take shit that people wished they could do and sit down and make first steps towards those impossible-seeming goals.</b>&nbsp; First actions, a gathering of materials and resources, and an actionable path forward.<br /><br /><b>Second, </b>and fucking important too,<b> I want to make these topics as un-intimidating as possible.</b> To this end, I have a planned mixture of adult episodes where guests and I tackle all sorts of cool shit while having a hackathon with a <i>case of beer or a bottle of wine or some cannabis</i> (where it's legal)- because <u>even rocket science isn't rocket science to rocket scientists</u>- and the other approach to making impossible-sounding topics not just possible, but things kids do in their garages, is <i>by getting kids and building the first steps of the awesome things with them</i>, giving them the skills to go forward, and letting them take things to completion.<br /><br />In case this needs to be spelled out, there will be *NO* overlap between kids and drugs.&nbsp; Drugs aren't for kids.<br /><br />This actually ties directly into the steam turbine project, because that is an example of the kind of thing that I think it's reasonable for the average 4th grade class in the rural US could reasonably build over the course of a month or two, and a motivated kid could build her own in a few days, accounting for the time it takes to make the windings in the motor. And by design, the same should be true of an Ethiopian kid who gets the kit airdropped into his village or the kid in rural China scrounging wire from busted TV's.&nbsp; Neither of these are in a vacuum, although they are separate efforts there will be some deliberate overlap- right now the plan is to have an instructional build series as a set of youpodtubecast episodes.<br /><br />OKAY OKAY I CAN HEAR YOU SCREAMING 'WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU CALLING IT A YOUPODTUBECAST', I'M GETTING TO THAT<br /><br />So, since there are a variety of data delivery vehicles available, the premise of this endeveavor is t: <br /><ol><li>Record everything</li><li>Chop it up according to medium; a collection of especially useful pictures and still frames from video, chop by audio only, chop by action on video only,&nbsp;</li><li>Compress the repetetive stuff down (so this is time lapse build vids on youtube, cutting out bathroom breaks in convos for podcast-specific audio, etc.</li></ol><br />Once that production is done, the release process is to publish each Episode as<br /><ol><li>A YouTube video,&nbsp;</li><li>A podcast episode on the iTunes and Android stores,</li><li>An infographic, image gallery, Powerpoint or whatever the fuck to present graphical data that can be consumed on low bandwidth connections. a visualized cliff notes is the goal, with graphics of the whole thing together assembled and in use, and then with the major parts laid out and their basic operating principles noted.</li></ol><br />GUESTS? WHAT! For what?<br /><br />Well, the premise of having guests on is to bring a variety of new and unique perspectives- I am deliberately shooting for a combination of "Holy shit I've heard of them, they're the best at X" and "who the fuck is that?", because the whole premise of bringing science to the masses is that fucking everyone can fucking do anything, you just have to fucking do it.&nbsp; So if I get rockstars and whatever, I'll be happy about that and regard it as an accomplishment, but that's not the point of doing this and I'd be happy doing it completely without them.&nbsp; Give me 3 drunk rednecks who flunked out of high school and a few raspberry pis and an eighth of weed, a 12 volt power supply, a few batteries, and not only will they have made their first robot at the end, they will be able to take that and go do more with it.&nbsp; I want people who think they couldn't possibly do any of this shit, because everyone can do it. it's just a matter of doing it.<br /><br />What sort of Episodes Do I have planned/ am I pursuing?<br /><ul><li>Wardriving and web and mobile security. How does data move through a network, where does it go, how does it get and stay safe, how do bad guys and good guys intercept and use it against you?</li><li>Food Foraging- obtaining usable nutrition from the wild, starting in the pacific northwest and moving around the country from there.</li><li>Glass Blowing- a few different ideas here, I have an idea for turning mason jars into faraday-cage observation jars for raspberry pi cameras to do high altitude and space observation </li><li>Raspberry Pi Dildo- this started as a joke, but I've actually had two seriously doable ideas, and there's even an instagram pic of one doodle of a parts diagram up already on this.</li><li>Raspberry Pi Fireworks launcher controller- fourth of july's gonna rock.</li><li>Raspberry Pi electric vehicle</li><li>Raspberry Pi Smart House functions</li><li>An episode on movie weapon stunt-fighting- how do fight scenes like crouching tiger get made, how do you train to do that and how do they record, and how much of what you see is really what it looks like, and what does the real parts of that look like compared to actual historical martial arts?</li><li>Various episodes on Languages and language learning.</li><li>I have this idea for an episode about the variety of experience based on the exterior social perceptions- I've lost about 100 lbs and have seen that first hand, and there's also a HUGE difference in experience between, eg, the blizzard of dick pics most women seem to get on the internet compared to the complete lack of engagement particularly physically not-perfect single males seem to have from all sectors, including each other. So the idea is to get a few different extreme perspectives, and the intent is to take this variety and quantify what sort of difference the experience is and what that means and what the game theories are for the different actors, socially, and especially online.</li><li>Audiobooks! I have a number of books I'd like to turn into audiobooks for easier consumption</li></ul>Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-82063194499234004212017-06-07T22:56:00.001-07:002017-06-07T23:04:43.592-07:00A Computational Basis for MoralityThis post is a fling, a one-off post on a single topic that I am attempting to coalesce my thoughts around.<br /><br />In this post, I will explore the opportunities and challenges of using a computer to make moral calculations, what assumptions morality must fundamentally include, and how a computing entity, a program or a network or a robot or whatever, might have the ability to set about making these sorts of calculations in a way that is acceptable to the human species as a basis for interaction with as collaborators.<br /><br />First, how can morality be calculated? Well, a number of conditions factor into the experience and potential for experience of:<br /><ul><li><b>Physical well-being</b>, or the actual vs expected biomechanical composition of a physical entitiy capable of experiencing it</li><li><b>Subjective experience</b>- "Happiness" or "satisfaction" or any variation of positive and desirable self-assessment of circumstances</li><li><b>Capacity for decision making</b>- the extent to which free decisions are available to be made without consequence, and the degree of the consequences.</li></ul>Now, some of you are already bitching about Sam Harris and the "conscious creatures happiness and well being" catchphrase, but even having seen all the bitching, I'm not aware of any argument that properly negates it on any level; the arguments I have seen against it seem to be largely either straw-men based on not properly thinking through what it actually means in practice, or else attempts to dogmatically over-assert a literal interpretation of&nbsp; some mythology or other as "necessary to make people behave this well".<br /><br />But, if this isn't satisfactory, what if there were an earlier example- such as the US Declaration of Independence, which specifies "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness"?<br /><br />So, for lack of better "Targets", I think these are a pretty good place to start. That gets us to the problem of implementing these sorts of targets into any sort of computer program; the world is not a vacuum and there isn't a way for computers to reliably evolve the capability to make life or death decisions that as an acceptable way to solve this problem.&nbsp; So the practical way forward here is a guided learning approach, where a number of categories of entities can be identified and kept in a program's memory from the available inputs- a camera feed to count faces and keep a record of each face moving around in the camera's field of vision, for example.<br /><br />So, in such a scenario, with the camera tracking people by face as they move around, what is our opportunity to make this meaningful and actionable? Well, perhaps around a swimming pool to track who's in or out and who's not moving in it and so on.&nbsp; What sort of challenges must this overcome? well, faces are only visible one cardinal direction at a time, so there should be other ways of identifying human and other sorts of entities (including unknowns), and there must be some sort of model of the environment to allow a computer to make meaningful predictions and so on.<br /><br />At this level, we have lists of entities, including lists of known types and specific known people.&nbsp; How might such lists be sorted and prioritized?&nbsp; I say that we should use the capacity for experiencing those three criterion above. Using that model, the extent to which you can experience happiness and how much potential happiness you have ahead of you, for example, becomes a calculatable moral detail.&nbsp; In this way, we can see that even though a mother might be equally related to her two children and her two parents- that is, she has a 50% genetic relationship to everyone there- it is still in her interest to save her children, because her children still have their lives ahead of them, and even genetically, her children have potential to pass on their genes and her parents (at least in modern demographics) almost certainly will not be passing on any more genes, at least not together.<br /><br />What about conflict? It is inevitable in the course of human affairs that around a topic, humans will arrange themselves into competing teams.&nbsp; This is even a beneficial characteristic, in some circumstances; in the startup world, this is popularized as "A-B testing", where two options are tried simultaneously and the more successful is kept to be built upon and the less successful is discarded (roughly- in practice it can be very different, perhaps option A is better under some circumstance, but option B is better under others- A restaurant selling pancakes may do better in morning than a restaurant selling pizza, but the pizza restaurant may do better in the evening, for example.<br /><br />At this level, we should consider a larger scale of program making assesments, perhaps a distributed network of sensors and signals that interact with humans to share data and enable rapid decision making in high-stakes calculations. Think that's never been done? Picture a traffic signal network.<br /><br />How about violence? In the course of conflict, not all outcomes around which humans organize can be justified or defended, and many must simply be condemned outright as shameful, wasteful, disgusting, needlessly cruel, and indifferent to the well being, happiness, or desires of others and their procession towards these desires.&nbsp; What of this?<br /><br />Aren't these universally the characteristics of a criminal? Isn't it always the case that this attitude should never be allowed to dictate the course of events where there is an unnecessary reliance on it as a source for any of the material necessities of happiness, well being, or self-determination? Isn't the result of any such calculation about dictatorship, then, a criminal infliction by those with the power to act in the better interests of the their fellows who fail to do so, by those who have no call to inflict injury or misery on them but do so anyway, or who invent cause to do so by which others so inflict these, especially when those inventions give rise to further opportunity needlessly taken or mistake justified, or ideological anchor given to the support of injuring without cause. <br /><br />At this scale, lets just attach these same sensors and tracking to law enforcement the way they're attached now, but let's examine this; Suddenly, via Google maps with a network of people all en-sensored, it's possible for this sort of network to pick up on specific clues and do very simple but effective IFF by virtue of being able to track people and give info back to the people with the sensors via whatever feedback interface they have- picture being able to hold up your phone and look down the street and it will literally highlight all the good guys in white and the bad guys in red, if you need a vision of what that could look like for this thought experiment.<br /><br />Given that human data tracking and processing can, in some specialized ways, far outstrip the capacity of the faculties of any single human, isn't it more stable to rely on this for justice than it is to rely on the fickle whims of humans?<br /><br />In this level, we begin to see legal implications. It is the nature of the Criminal Justice System, at least in most places, to be designed in such a way that many small discretely inconsequential infractions can occur, with or without the knowledge of the actor committing them, and accumulate over the years.&nbsp; It is not by accident that the Mafia kingpin Al Capone was brought to trial by the charge of tax evasion via a provision in US tax law that legally requires criminals to report their earnings fucking seriously.<br /><br />If the automation of this infraction detection were implemented, it would either be an unparalleled asymmetric advantage of any party with access to that information over any party without it, and/or it will necessitate by its' very nature a sweeping set of legal reforms to fully accommodate for human nature and the nature of sentience and possibly- though this is another discussion entirely- the question of sentience in any sense like the sense in which we experience it in anything that is not us.<br /><br />And so, not assuming the existence of any form of artificial intelligence, not relying on any sort of singularity or anything else, it seems inevitable that the utility of computers will outstrip the ability of humans to use them responsibly, especially if we leave decision making up to 'the troup's favorite monkey's decision' of democracy instead of moving onto some form of meritocracy.&nbsp; Which, for the first time ever, becomes fucking possible thanks to computers getting cheap and good enough to do this on a large scale, at least conceivably.<br /><br />And I didn't even <b>Start</b> talking about what happens with robots with guns.Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-13478971924818217812017-06-07T12:56:00.001-07:002017-06-07T23:03:11.371-07:00ملحد في عائلة عائلة مسيحية An Arabic Translation of "Being the Atheist in a Christian Family"&nbsp;ما سيأتي هو عبارة عن رسالة أرسلتها إلى والدي لأشرح له سبب عدم وجود فرصة لأطفالي للذهاب إلى "مدرسة الكتاب المقدس في العطلة" (سفسطة ثلاثية إذا كان هناك أحداها) وكاد هذا أن يقود إلى إثارة الخصومة فيما بيننا لكن رسالة البريد الإلكتروني تلك نجحت في تلطيف الجو بشكل جيد تماما، وبالتالي، أنا أستنسخها هنا لتكون مرجعا مستقبلي.<br /><br />من ينتهك خصوصية الأسماء المذكورة، فأنا أسميه حيوانا.<br /><br />مرحبا والدي!<br />كتبت هذه الرسالة وكنت أفكر بأن أرسلها إليك وإلى أمي أوﻻ لكن أعرف إنه من الآمن أن أرسلها إليك أوﻻ لتفادي النزاعات.<br />إذن، لدينا حديث جيد في يوم آخر، لكن هناك شيء واضح جدا ليس لديكم فكرة عنه على ما أعتقد. أنا ﻻ أريد أن أعكس أكثره على أي أحد. لأن الكل يحتاجون إلى أن ينامون ليلا، لكنني أعرف إن بإمكاني أن أشرح لكما الموضوع في بعض النقاط، مع وصف مختصر بخصوص كيف ولماذا توصلت إلى تلك الإستنتاجات وأتخذت تلك القرارات، لذا، يمكنكما مناقشة الأشياء التي تهمني وتقلقني، أنا ليس عندي إيمان<br /><br />¤ ليس لدي معتقدات، لأنني رفضت فلسفيا صحة "الاعتقاد" كمفهوم. ببساطة، الاعتقاد لا يجعل شيئا صحيحا، والكفر لا يجعل شيئا كاذبا. في أحسن الأحوال، تعتقدون أن شيئا ما صحيحا - وفي هذه الحالة يكون الاعتقاد زائف.في أسوأ الأحوال، إذا كنت تعتقد شيئا كاذبا، وبالتالي فإن الاعتقاد، في حد ذاته، هو حاجز للتفاهم. لذا، بدلا من ذلك، أحاول أن أكون لديكم بيانات ومعرفة ('من'، 'ما'، 'أين'، 'كم'، و 'متى'،'كيف' و 'لماذا') . أنا لا أأمن ب "الانفجار الكبير"، أو في التطور، أو حتى بأنني أجلس على طاولة المطبخ أكتب هذا من أجلكما. ويكفي أن أتقبل أن الدليل هو أن هذه الأمور تبدو كما هي، بغض النظر عن كيف أفكر بها، وأنه لمن واجبي-إذا كنت مهتما- معرفتها وفهمها، بدل 2<br />أن أخبر نفسي-أو أي شخص آخر- إنها صحيحة أو خاطئة.<br /><br />وهذا له نتيجة طبيعية - أنا أرفض أيضا صحة أي إيمان، والذي أعتبره "إدعاء الحقيقة دون أو على الرغم من السبب أو الدليل". ولكن "الإيمان" faith في اللغة الإنجليزية له العديد من الاستخدامات وراء هذا المعنى - في كثير من الأحيان أشياء مثل "الولاء"، "الثقة"، الخ - وأنا لا أرفض هذه الأشياء، ولكن أحاول استخدام هذه الكلمات الأكثر تحديدا بدلا من تلك.<br /><br />¤ توقفت عن المسيحية لأنه لم يعد ممكنا، ومعرفة ما أعرفه، لقبول أنه قد يكون صحيحا. هناك جبال الأدلة والكثير من الأسباب ضد ما تعتقد. هذه هي الأشياء التي كنت "حاد" حول التناقضات في الكتاب المقدس، وعدم الدقة، والتزوير، والأكاذيب الظاهرة هدفها تحقيق مكاسب سياسية من قبل المؤلفين، والأدلة الأثرية، والسجلات التاريخية، وما إلى ذلك كان معرفة ذلك مؤلم جدا بالنسبة الي ولكن عملية ميقضة للبصيرة. لذلك يمكن أن يقول شخص بمكاني"إذا كان هناك إله أم لا، فهو ليس ذلك الإله الذي تؤمن به". ولكن أنا لا أكره المسيحية، بنفس الطريقة التي لا تكره أي دين آخر. أنا فقط أعتقد أنها غير صحيحة في الواقع. أنا لا أكره المسيحيين. لديك أسباب وجيهة للتفكير والقيام بما تقوم به، مثل كل العوامل الاجتماعية - على سبيل المثال، القدرة على التحدث مع والديك &lt;أمي&gt; دون أن يفكروا بأنك ﻻبد أن تكون "شريرا" أو "ضعيف روحيا" . لكنني لا أعتقد أن هذه الأسباب تساهم بشكل ذو معنى في حقيقة مطالبات المسيحية.<br /><br />المهم أيضا: لم يحدث شيء سيء ليسبب هذا. ما زلت أعمل بنشاط على دراسة موضوعات الكتاب المقدس - ومن هنا أذكر {قراءة} كتب جوش ماكدويل، و سي اس لويس، من بين أمور أخرى. ولكن أعتقد أن أفضل درس متاح من أي من هذه هي كيف تفكر، وليس بماذا تفكر.<br /><br />اعتقادي بالإله أعطاني آلية إضافية للتأقلم على أشياء - "إن الله لا يعطيك ما لا يمكنك التعامل معه" - وكان مصدرا للأمل في بعض الحالات المظلمة جدا. لا أحد يسبب "سوء التصرف" لي الشك. لدي الكثير من الاحترام لكيفية التعامل مع معتقداتكما. ولكن أيا من هذه ليس لها أي تأثير على ما إذا كانت المعتقدات صحيحة أم لا، وفي النهاية، كان الأمر أكثر أهمية بالنسبة لي. وهكذا كان علي في نهاية المطاف مواجهة القضية المتنامية ضد المسيحية التي كنت قد أصبحت أكثر وعيا و قابلية للمعرفة لسنوات. الآن يجب أن تكون قد لاحظت نتيجة ذلك، ولكن أنا أمتنع عن التعامل مع ذلك هنا لأنني أعلم إنكما لا ترياند أن تسمعانه<br /><br />آخر نقطة فرعية حول هذا: أنا لست ملتزما بفكرة أن المسيحية كاذبة، ولكن إذا كان هناك قضية يجب أن تكون لذلك، يجب أن تكون هذه لها أيضا الأدلة والأسباب التي وجدت ضدها؛ مسميا كل ذلك ب "خدعة إبليس". ربما هناك أدلة وأسباب لا أعرف عنها، وإذا وجدتها، وأنها لا تصف ما وجدته، ليس لدي شيء ضد إعتناق المسيحية- ولكن في تلك المرحلة، وأنا لا أمسك نفسي.<br /><br />¤ أنا مادي، بمعنى أنني أعتقد أن الأشياء التي لا وجود لها لا وجود لها. ربما هناك شيء أبعد من هذا الكون الطبيعي. ولكن لم يكن هناك أي أدلة مقنعة كنت قادرا على اكتشافه أنه لا يمكن فهمها بطريقة أخرى أفضل. ولكنني أعتقد أيضا أن ما نحن عليه ليس كل ما يمكن أن نكون، وأنه كل شيء عن كيفية استخدام جوهر نفسك وبيئتك قبل أن تموت الذي يوفر أفضل مجموعة من الاحتمالات. حتى لو كنا أجهزة كمبيوتر فقط، أجهزة الكمبيوتر لا تزال آلات مذهلة التي يمكن أن تفعل أشياء رهيبة، والخطوة الأولى نحو الارتقاء هو معرفة كيفية الترقية.<br /><br />كعنوان فرعي، أعتقد أن التفسيرات المادية للتجربة الدينية هي أكثر منطقية من التفسيرات الخارقة للطبيعة. من المنطقي بالنسبة لي أن التجربة الدينية تحدث لأن العقول البشرية هي آلات مذهلة ولكن ناقصة، من أن نفكر أن هناك جيوش الشياطين تعمل لرمي الناس في النار<br /><br />¤ أنا ملحد، وليس عدمي. وأعتقد أن على الجميع أن يجدوا أو يجعلوا أغراضهم الخاصة، حتى المسيحيين. السنجاب هو أكثر عدمية مني. وبالتالي، فإنه لا يرى أي مشكلة في أخذ الأطفال إلى الكنيسة، لأن الجميع سوف يموت على أي حال. وأعتقد أن الوقت القليل الذي نقضيه إليه هنا ينبغي ألا يضيع على ذلك، لأن أيا منا لن يحصل على مزيد من الوقت هنا، والعواقب لا تبرر ذلك ببساطة؛ على أقل تقدير، وهذا يعني أننا نتفق على أن الكنيسة هي أكثر من مجرد مجالسة الأطفال مجانا.<br />ما سأقوله الآن هذا سيغضبكما، بالمناسبة. لقد اغتصبت وقتلت كل ما أريد.والكمية التي أريدها هي صفر. إذا كان الشيء الوحيد الذي يمنعك من القيام بذلك هو الخوف من الجحيم، فأنت لست شخصا جيد. المسيحية لا تعطيك "القوى العظمى الأخلاقية"، وانها مهينة عندما تتصرف وكأنك على نحو ما بأنك الوحيد القادر على التحقق إذا كان هناك شيء على حق أو خطأ. ليس هناك عمل وجدت أن المؤمن يمكن أن يفعله والكافر لا يمكنه فعله. ولكن الدين، الخاص بك وبلآلخرين، يمكن أن يجعل الناس العاديين ﻻ أخلاقيين ويقومون بالأشياء الشريرة والأشرار التي لا أحد سوف تنظر خلاف ذلك.<br /><br />آمل أن يكون هذا ليس طويلا جدا، وآمل أنا لا تجوب يا رفاق. لقد تركت عمدا أدلة بلدي وركزت على التفكير بدلا من ذلك. أنا آسف لتسمية معتقداتكما "تقاليد" و "أساطير". أنا ﻻ أحاول إرغامكما.لكنني فقط أشعر بأنني محاط بأشخاص يحاولون فعل ذلك لي ولأطفالي، لأنهم يحاولون نقلهم إلى الكنيسة - عندما كنت قد ذكرت مرارا وتكرارا أنني غير مرتاح لها ولا أريد أن يحدث ذلك - فهذا مثال على ذلك. أنا آسف أمي لجعلك تشعرين بالشفقة لذلك، ولكن هذا يبدو وكأنه البلطجة بالنسبة لي، وهذا سبب آخر لعدم السماح للأطفال يذهبون إلى هذه الكنيسة.<br /><br />شيء مرادف يمكن أن يساعدك على فهم ذلك. إذا كنت تزور منزل مسلم وطلبوا لكم الركوع على الأرض للصلاة قبل العشاء. انه ليس معتقدك، انه معتقدهم، ويمكنك احترامه والركوع، ولكن لا ينبغي أن يفهمون ذلك بمعني أنهم يمكن أن تجروك إلى المسجد بعد ذلك، أو أنهم سوف يفعلون لك صالح عند أخذ أطفالك هناك بعد أن أخبرتهم بأنك غير راضين عن ذلك. أعتقد أنني أتذكر أن أمي رفضت "دعوات" مماثلة عندما كنت في عمر فينس أبني، لنفس الأسباب.<br /><br />وأخيرا، أريد أن أذكر بأنني أحبكما. أنا لا أعتقد أنكما والدين ناقصين في أي شكل من الأشكال، وأنا فقط أختلف معكما عن دينكما، وهذا كل شيء.Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-90423823252641684222017-06-03T16:20:00.004-07:002017-06-03T16:24:00.838-07:00On HuntingThis began as a tangent on the post about designing firearms, and I realized it needed to be addressed separately.<br /><br /><br /><ol><li><b>There's not a viable way to feed the human species without meat.</b>&nbsp; Humans biologically require the spectrum of vitamins, nutrients, proteins, amino acids, and so on from animal sources at some point in our food chain, and the only current way to produce that on the scale necessary is with animal sources.&nbsp; It isn't that a vegetarian diet has no health benefits- vegetables, particularly dark leafy greens, should play a much larger dietary role for a much larger section of the population than they currently do- but the complete absence of meat would be devastating for the human species, and what few of us survived would necessarily be biologically something different.&nbsp; The average vegan who has not had animal protein or supplements in over a year can typically raise their IQ by ten points with a single dose of creatine monohydrate, a popular bodybuilding supplement that's only available from animal sources like red meat, and if that's news and you want a fact that hits closer to home, look up vegan fertility rates. Again, vegans, I love you guys, but y'all are doing some shit the rest of us can't, and that isn't really plausible as a full-time solution for everyone. </li><li><b>A natural life is better for the animal, and in such a way that makes it better for the person eating it</b>. Even if that wild life entails a miserable hunt at the end, so what? The domestic ones get slaughtered too, they just know it, and watch their whole family go get killed in a line in front of them before- and even in the best case of domestication the animals should be allowed to live as much according to their nature as possible so as to develop most suitably into the food they will be used as afterwards, and then that animal should be fucking respected and not wasted and used inappropriately.</li><li><b>Humans are biologically predators and have ecologically replaced the apex predators in the ecosystems around the world.</b>&nbsp; If we are going to sustain an ecosystem, which is the fucking point of "Conservation" efforts, we need to make sure that the jobs in it are getting done, even if the creatures doing those jobs are not present, which is why you've seen that picture of Chinese farmers polinating their apple trees manually with paint brushes.</li><li><b>Biologically, because of our evolution as predators, you should expect some of us to have the experience of being driven to hunt</b>, a desire to hunt or kill animals for food, and ability and willingness to participate in this, even just socially.&nbsp; <b>Because of this, there should be some socially acceptable way for those people to do that</b>.&nbsp; And that's basically what "hunting" is and always has been, until Bambi, it seems, because that was the crossing of the graph lines between mechanized agriculture and cultural personification of animals.</li></ol><br />There is even a place for Trophy hunting; trophy hunting is a good thing. Trophy hunting of dozens of species of particularly gazelle has led to them literally coming back from extinction. We should do it to fucking Rhinos and elephants, not because I dislike rhinos and elephants, not because I want to hunt them or don't know about the level of consciousness they have, but because taking out the antisocial and aggressive members of the population that are attacking other members can be beneficial, and if you want to argue that you have to be a sick motherfucker to want to pull that trigger, why not regulate the fuck out of it, so as to keep anything too fucked from going down, and charge the guy who STILL wants to do it enough money to pay for cloning the other elephants worth having?<br /><br />Seriously, just google "male elephant" and watch a few videos- watch one of the indian elephants, the smaller type that lives in the jungles in asia, throw a motorbike at a guy when it'd had enough of being abused by its handler.&nbsp; watch it demolish cars like they're nothing. <u>Elephants are majestic wonderful fucking animals, I have been lucky enough to interact with several and they have been wonderful animals and I loved them</u>, but when you've got an outcaste one that's attacking the other elephants and attacking people and being a vindictive destructive pain in the ass everywhere it goes, is it too much to ask to end that elephant in as humane a way as possible, and charge the sort of motherfucker who wants to shoot elephants enough money to help the rest of the herd along?<br /><br />Since the nature of the problem of poaching is desperate uneducated motherfuckers with AK-47's who are trying to get money for food, and their interaction leaves them without urgency for saving animals that have been feared and reviled historically, but that ignorance can't be treated as stupidity- those guys aren't stupid.&nbsp; They certainly aren't stupid about supply and demand- their customers are in fucking China, usually- and if you say "hey, wait wait, this could be a business but you have to stop killing and start being custodial", that could be a huge opportunity for a species like elephants and rhinos, AND it could be a huge opportunity for the humans in the area too.<br /><br />The nature of trophy hunting means that it is rigorously regulated, because it can be taxed and will generate revenue anyway, and there are actually population problems with endangered animals that necessitate some portion of them to be killed so as to not pose a danger to the actual breeding population- the classic example is straggler male lions, which have the benefit of being extremely popular trophies AND extremely disastrous if left near breeding females, because the lion breeding strategy is to kill all the competing male's cubs so the females all stop lactating and go into heat, and then start fucking them all, which in lions involves a lot of fighting and biting, causing some percentage of females to die every generation breeding cycle.&nbsp; So if you left the male population unchecked, you'd get a population that would grow quickly until the males started overcompeting and killing the females off faster than they are reproducing, and the population collapses- and best case scenario, you're down to square one + the first generation of inbreeding.<br /><br />Take that, and realize the male lions make enough money to hire, train, and equip expert game wardens, civilian and in government services, who are custodians over large free-ranging but segregated wild lion populations, from which the troublesome males are segregated off and hunted, and the revenues generated pay for the sustenance of the whole population. Because while these are wild animals, it is a breeding program, and so a steady supply of food is always available whether it's naturally available or not, from purchased livestock meat and so on.<br /><br />But do I hunt? No, I don't. I don't like killing animals, it isn't fun for me, although I can and have. The day I am writing this, I killed a spider and was angry about it, because I half-crushed it on accident and didn't want to leave it to suffer, folded in half on a counter top, and so I finished it off. I like shooting- not killing. I have shot birds - they did not suffer, but I do not remember the experience fondly. I am even copious about killing the brain of a fish before I gut it, and the science seems to back this up- the stress hormones of an animal in distress actually make it taste bad, whether that's a lobster or a cow.&nbsp; So even though I for example oppose all notions of "Islam" as despicable fairytales that have been shamefully inflicted on Arab culture, I have no problem admitting that by keeping Halal- which has specifications about the extent to which the animal can suffer, and an ideal for minimizing that for general purposes of food, at least- can produce some reliably excellent quality meat.<br /><br />So that's my two cents, why I think we should all stop being dicks to each other about this discussion. Hunters, nonhunters don't get it. They just don't. Don't listen to a colorblind art critic's bitching about the rainbow they can't see all of. Nonhunters, not seeing what someone else sees does not mean you are inferior. People are different, you are different, you may have made different decisions about how you might address problems like animal suffering or food production, but your opportunities are not universally available.&nbsp; Not because I think assholes should have a social way to torture animals, but because people trying not to be assholes should have an outlet that tortures animals less than the ones we use for food and treats them, before and after death, more respectfully. Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-66233169893415438432017-06-02T17:32:00.001-07:002017-06-02T17:38:19.979-07:00Doesn't designing guns automatically mean you're an asshole with no regards for life?<br />In a word, fuck no.<br /><br />*Editing notice: this is a draft that is getting refined into final form, pictures videos and visual aids are still being added.* <br /><br />So, this topic is a can of worms, and I see too many people arguing on all sides about it- and with valid arguments on all sides, which rather than making things clearer, makes it harder to be objective. There are real costs to every trade-off regarding this, and I have had to think long and hard about this, from the perspective of the set of knowledge that I have, and so I've decided to break the silence and become more open about this, what it is, what it means, why I did and still do it sometimes, and what can come next and which section of the 'next' I'm optimistic and worried about.<br /><br />First, why guns?<br /><br />Well, they're fun.&nbsp; They're fun to disassemble and reverse engineer; they're fun to handle, psychologically, because of how our brains evolved.&nbsp; They're incredibly fun to shoot, especially if you can shoot well- but they're incredibly fun to shoot even if you've never done it or are terrible at it.<br /><br />So I see fun, so long as it does not put an undue burden on anybody else, as a valid reason to have something- recreational shooting, so long as you aren't shooting bystanders, should be as legal as alcohol and recreational marijuana, for the same reasons.<br /><br />Second, aren't guns just for killing?<br /><br />Yes and no.&nbsp; It is true that this is the origin and specified intent of guns, but it also needs to be acknowledged that<br /><ol><li><b>Guns used to be tools of necessity and mostly aren't anymore.</b>&nbsp; The change is mostly thanks to mechanized agriculture supplanting much of subsistence hunting, and particularly the technology of the last century- artillery, aircraft, radios, computers, and the lot- have made individual firearms as a viable means of self-defense largely obsolete, especially as the emergence of assymetric warfare has necessitated weapons capable of destroying vehicles and infrastructure, weapons such as IEDs and rocket propelled grenades (which are far simpler than most people realize- a black powder rocket on the back, a fuse on the tip, and a shaped charge inside two cones glued end to end for a warhead- and various types of warheads are available, and even the auto self-destruct that causes these to detonate at 800 meters has been used as improvised airbursts to attack aircraft, particularly helicopters on patrol).&nbsp; Basically, if you're going to war these days, the guys with the guns are either the guys without a real army, or else they're the cleaning crew to come in and police a scene. Even the SEALS deal with hostage rescue and only shooting bad guys.</li><li><b>Just because they're mostly toys doesn't mean we shouldn't have them. </b>The capacity for humans to play with dangerous machines within acceptable margins of safety, especially where some small segment of experts perform well for the entertainment of others, is already a widely disseminated form of entertainment- look at car and motorcycle racing, for example, or other combat sports. <i>The argument for gun control in spite of recreational shooting is the same argument prohibitionists made against alcohol</i>, the same nonsense spewed against most recreational drug legalization.&nbsp; The argument to limit features, like magazine size, is understandable but still based on cowardice about the nature of guns, rather than an understanding and acceptance of what they are and a resolve to be responsible about them.&nbsp; Telling the good guys that they must have a gun that is clunky and difficult to use is an immoral proposition if they must use those guns against bad guys without that engineered disadvantage.&nbsp; To those bleeding-heart liberals here reading this scoffing about "then everybody could have machine guns and silencers and magically be ninja assassins!"- machine guns have specific uses, should be legal to people who have demonstrated competence and trustworthiness (think "drivers license"), and suppressors shouldn't just be legal, they should be fucking mandatory, as they reduce hearing damage, increase bullet stability, facilitate communication, NONE of them make the bullet silent (particularly bigger faster bullets that make a bigger 'splash' as they go through the air, because that 'splash' of air is the source of part of the sound of a gunshot, the same way lightning makes thunder), and they reduce the recoil and make the gun longer AND make it more obvious which direction it's pointing AND the extra length keeps the muzzle further away from hands and face.&nbsp; Silencers don't make you a killer, they make your gun safer and you less of an asshole- and in some places in Europe now, hunting without them is banned for all these reasons and then some.<br /><br />Perspective: the guy who invented the firearm silencer was the son of a machine gun inventor, and he also took his silencer and put it on the then-new car engine and called it a 'muffler'.</li><li><b>There is virtually no possibility of effective gun control, nor will there be, ever.&nbsp; The only thing that can stop a human motivated human from making or buying a gun is death</b>. Guns are sufficiently easy to improvise that the bad guys gun control is intended to keep them away from remain largely unaffected by bans, either because of black market supply of existing manufactured guns, or of the opportunity of smaller manfacturers to improvise guns, and the examples of this I know of off-hand include everything from single-shot guns being made in US prisons in the late 20th century to<a href="https://www.scribd.com/doc/15655467/24HR-AK47"> white supremacists in the US making "AK Pistols" with scrounged parts, <u>including rubber bands as a 'main spring'</u> to close the bolt</a>, to the plethora of <a href="http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2015/03/10/australian-police-seize-homemade-submachine-gun-drug-raid/">Luty home-made submachine guns being confiscated by Australian police</a> these days, to the the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2251804/Built-scrap-primitive-deadly-firearms-Chechen-rebels-use-Russia.html">improvised weapons captured by the Russians in the Chechnyan conflict</a>, to the entire illegal city economies of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4qwK1KgL_s">Danao, in the Philippines</a>, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FinRqCocwGE">Darra, in Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan</a>- <i>two cites where the literal backbone of the economy is otherwise generally unskilled and uneducated people making varying quality of working firearms, from scratch, with hand tools</i>.&nbsp; <br /><br />I've personally made a small improvised rifling machine with a bench vise, a cold-rolled steel tube, a long plank as a bed to mount the barrel on, and a block with a pin to guide the tube. <u>This shit is NOT rocket science.</u></li><li><b>Since we can't get rid of guns, we have no choice but to be responsible with and about them instead.</b>&nbsp; Since we can't completely keep them out of the hands of bad guys, we need to keep them available to the good guys to shoot back with, or else grow the fuck up about giving them to robots to shoot at the bad guys for us, because if that's happening, then it's literally as simple as the robots only needing to shoot at people with guns to keep the rest of us safe, and their efficiency at it now already renders human-driven combat obsolete.</li><li><b>Without the technology of firearms, much of the modern world would not have been possible.</b>&nbsp; Making firearms is not rocket science, but the development of firearms, starting in the 12th century with the introduction of gunpowder to Eastern Europe and the Middle East and the first sort-of-cannon-things shooting rocks at walls, paved the way for first greater quality metallurgy and materials science. As parts became more reliable and safer, they got smaller and more usable by single men. As the expertise in making these parts increased, new tools were developed that allowed greater and greater precision of manufacture.&nbsp; In fact, one of the most important advancements was in using threaded rods- like on a screw or bolt- to control moving tools back and forth, since moving to the same place time after time was reduced to a problem of turning the rod the same number of times to move a piece across a tool, or a tool across a piece.&nbsp; This in turn allowed for greater precision of tools, allowing us to correct smaller and smaller errors in manufacture, ultimately giving rise to the logistical possibility of a concept called "economies of scale" by virtue of making repeatable mass production possible- because <u>Firearms are the highest-performance mass-produced machine currently produced by the human species</u>.&nbsp; Computers are higher precision, but have few or no moving parts, only very occasionally contain explosives or projectiles.&nbsp; Rockets and engines are higher performance, but are not mass-produced on the same scale, especially when you consider the scale of precision and the scale of manufacture of ammunition, which typically has a margin of error of&nbsp;+/-0.003, or approximately the width of a piece of phonebook paper, between a usable cartridge and a catastrophic explosive failure (well, depending on a lot of things, especially how much gun, bullet, case, and powder there are and how they're configured when the powder starts to ignite).</li></ol><br />So how did I get into this?<br />When I was 18, I was up watching a movie in my house alone, and somebody egged my window. I heard the first egg hit and looked and couldn't process it, and the second and third hit as I watched, and I didn't process it for a second, until I remembered having heard of it (if you haven't, "egging a window" means "throwing an egg at somebody's window"). My reaction was to go in my dad's closet, get his shotgun, bring it out, and try to figure out how to take the lock off it, and fail utterly. That experience made me realize- anything can happen, the best civilization can do to a situation is react quickly, and I didn't have any capacity to respond in kind if shit hit fans.<br /><br />I don't remember if it was the next day exactly, but more or less immediately I bought my first gun, a Ruger Mini-14.&nbsp; It's a great gun and I won't disrespect it, it functioned well, and I put a few thousand rounds through it happily over the next year and a half before leaving for Thailand- you can read about that elsewhere on here- and, in taking apart my gun for maintenance, I became familiar with how the individual parts matched up, what each part was doing, and how they all worked together, and it <i>also</i> provided a test-bed for creating models of how to think about different things, like material interactions, or how explosions progress through a compustible material and expand it into a large compressed gas, or how the shockwave of the impact of the energy of recoil of the shot propagates through the body of a weapon and moves the weapon, the bullet, the shooter, etc, in slow motion, what the stresses are on the pieces of metal holding a door on the ass of a pipe bomb until the big piece of shrapnel goes past the explosion valve at the front end of the pipe and lets the 'BOOM' hit a piston and drive the firearm's engine to reload itself. <br /><br />The opportunity, via shooting clubs and particularly machine gun clubs and a marine delayed entry program, to inspect, fire, and even in some cases disassemble a wide variety of venerable and then-modern firearms (for military buffs the m16a2 was still standard issue) exposed me not only to the guns but the culture of discipline surrounding them- how to use them safely, down to the specifics of "how do you stand, sit, kneel, squat, and bend over when you're carrying a rifle, so that you don't accidentally point it at somebody?"- which is the sort of detail that I think is not visible enough for outsiders, especially with the visibility stupid assholes with guns are able to gain. I also want to specify- this was not my original introduction to gun safety, but as with any skill, the safe and effective handling of a firearm increases with practice- and these guys gave me the model, and I put my own time in on it substantially.<br /><br />So this is what I want to convey to outsiders; I like shooting, and I do not like killing, although I can kill and live with it.&nbsp; I do not hunt for sport. What shooting I do for recreation falls into the most common category of shooting, casually referred to as "plinking", but you might think of it as "target practice", since that's the most common form ("Plinking" refers to the "plink" sound of a bullet hitting a can).&nbsp; In fact, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IK2RUxVq3A">the sort shooting I advocate for</a> is generally of a non-lethal variety, and directly comparable to sports like boxing, racing, golf, or anything else where individuals or team.&nbsp; I am also a fan of IPSC ("International Pistol-Shooting Competition", which is also an Olympic sport.<br /><br /><br /><a name='more'></a><br />So, all of that's neato, but don't I design guns? What kind, and why?<br /><br />Well, let me step through this process logically.&nbsp; I don't have graphics available anymore on some of these, but there is a series of designs I have come up with based on the knowledge I had at the time, and the circumstances under which I was able to proceed about conceptualizing these weapons (some of which I built pieces for, none of which were ever assembled into actual firing weapons, if I were to assess it now I would say perhaps 1/3 of the designs have enough technical merit to be, say, products on the american civilian gun market, if not more, but some of the designs had fundamental flaws or techincal hurdles that were not overcome).<br /><br />The first major gun I developed from the ground up was a 45 caliber submachine gun based roughly around implementing a complete set of working dimensions of a barrel and magazine, and then having to work things out. How the fuck do you control this fucking little pipe bomb when it goes off 15 times per second? How does it take the old brass out of the barrel? How does it spit it out the side of the gun? How does it pick up the new cartridge? How does that go into the barrel, every fucking time, like clockwork? how many pounds would it weigh if you measured the force going forward on a bathroom scale, and how many pounds going backward, and what direction(s, if it's more than one) is that going? how much pressure is holding the brass outward, sticking it to the inside of the barrel, for how long, and what does that depend on? How does a barrel make a bullet spin, why is that important, and how the fuck do you make the rifling?&nbsp; So that was my practical introduction, and I didn't learn everything- it would be another year or two before I really started to understand the black magic of rifling*, and it's something I continue to refine my understanding of.<br /><br />After that I began working out the importance of lockup mechanisms, and my research started to point out the importance of removing mechanical interference from the barrel, turbulent interference from the gases pushing the bullet down the bore, especially at the exit of the muzzle (there are a whole category of muzzle devices and configurations- particularly large projectiles, artillery rounds, tank shells, and some high power rifle rounds, divert gas backwards to pull the gun forwards like a rocket, reducing the amount of recoil the shooter feels when firing or controlling the direction of the exposed flame, limiting the visible distance of the shooter when fired, and guns that specialize in long-distance shooting, again think high-powered rifles as compared to pistols, tend to have special geometry around where the bullet exits the gun to keep the gas from exiting behind it in a lop-sided fashion and pushing it off balance.<br /><br />So, being an H&amp;K fanboy at the time, I loved the MP5 and wanted to make something like that to correct what I thought were the ergonomic failures of the gun- the magazine in front of the grip to copy the rifle the action was scaled down from was unnecessarily clunky, a magazine through the grip decreased the amount of work needed to balance the gun on the hand for shooting, a bolt lockback was nice but needed to be ambidextrous to be a truly ergonomic weapon (I had not seen the g36 charging handle at this point and actually came up with something very similar, except cylindrical and intended to be pulled back and locked upwards- on either side- like a classic mp5), and the other gun I spent a substantial time studying at the time was the ak47, so my intent was to take the ease-of-manufacture of the AK and put the operating principles of an MP5 onto a new 9mm submachine gun.<br /><br />Which, since I was a missionary at the time, that informed a lot of design decisions; the people I saw who might possibly want or need something like this were tribal minorities on the border with Thailand, and the idea was that a 9mm, particularly a suppressed 9mm, would be an excellent defensive weapon against attacks by the enemy troops- remember that the SPDC in Burma were actively trying to ethnically cleanse out many of these people, they were conscripting their children as soldiers and the adults as slave laborers- without giving the people who had these too much power to inflict evil on their neighbors- and also it is an economical gun to have, manufacturable locally, and the manufacture of it could provide the basis for further industry, as I was just learning it had done- arguably, in some ways- in Danao, in Cibu in the Philippines, and in Darra in Pakistan since around the time of the British invasion of Afghanistan.<br /><br />There were a set of designs around taking the lockup of the Mp5, making the locking parts out of heavy gauge sheet steel, replacing the rollers with wedges (I hadn't seen a Tokarev at the time, I eventually worked out that there would be problems from pressure squeezing the interior bolt causing it to stick), and I found a patent that put it on top of the barrel- rather than in line behind it- and it blew my mind, so I have looked for novel ways to lock up guns consistently in line with the bore ever since then.<br /><br />Shortly after that, I began looking into medium-caliber self loading rifles ("assault rifles", essentially things like the ar-15 and ak-47). I was and am horified by the prospect of child soldiers, and so I wanted to make something deliberately unusable by children, and beyond making some things specifically sized in ways that make it unsafe for smaller users, I don't really think that's possible now. But at the time, I devised combination grip and trigger safeties to keep small hands from firing and so on.<br /><br />The major rifle that came out of that development is a lot like a famas, really. It's a wedge-delayed non-inline blowback rifle with a large carry handle with a grooved picatinny rail and a backward tilted windage-adjustable barrel sight allowing a sight picture down the groove to a post, with an ambidextrous pull-to-lock charging handle, and a full-length-freefloated barrel, in a stock that's solid enough to hit someone with if you have to without fucking up point of aim. I came up with rail-mounting grenade launchers and bayonets and the lot for it.<br /><br />After these developments, I've continued on my own with smaller thought experiments, such as retrofitting existing rifles into modern weapon systems, exploration of 3D print guns, and the only current backburnered project I might consider pursuing in this regard is a 9mm carbine, roughly modeled on the handling and characteristics of a gun from the company KelTec called the "sub 2000" on the american civilian market- it's a popular competition shooting and recreational gun that uses cheap and easy to obtain interchangeable parts (like magazines from popular pistols that fire the same bullet- so if you have a 9mm handgun you can get a sub 2000 that uses the same magazines and bullets) on a gun that folds in half- so my project on this is essentially an open-source version of this format of gun, a simple, useful without being overpowered gun, where the intent is to 3d print the parts necessary to make a fully functioning gun that is actually worth having, using 3/4" threaded rod for a bolt, a 1/4" drill bit to make the initial hole, and a 3d printed rifling head to hold the tool to cut the rifling with, probably segments of hacksaw blade, and then a case-hardening treatment to actually change the weak mild steel of the threaded rod into something with a tough high-carbon steel skin by a metallurgical process called 'case hardening'.**<br /><br />Why contribute a 3d printed gun, you ask?<br /><br />Because these weapons are fucking inevitable, and I want the fewest deaths fucking possible, and the way to do that is to make sure that the guns that <u>are</u> available are <u>safe</u> to use, accurate and effective, but without the damage characteristics of guns that, for example, overpenetrate and will cause casualties in nearby buildings.&nbsp; So this is a nice handy little carbine that would be great for police work or for sports shooting, and maybe as a backpacking rifle that you could hunt small game with and at least have a shot at deterring a bear attack with, and the idea is that it's open source and produceable anywhere, just like all the other shit I come up with.<br /><br />Pretending you can put technology back under a rock, pretending you can make guns go away, is fucking nonsense until it's robots with guns and not under human control, or some other force of weapon capable of inflicting extinction on us. As long as some of us have guns, as long as they're in the hands of bad guys, there is a case for them to be in the hands of good guys too.&nbsp; As long as they can be responsibly used, there shouldn't be fundamental restrictions on who can get one, the same way that there isn't a restriction on getting a driver's license unless you've <i>really</i> fucked up. And I do think there should be a barrier of entry to test and ensure competence, and that the criteria and the registry of who tried to get on it and who got on and who didn't and why they failed to should be public information, so that even though it's tracked, it isn't information that can give any side an asymmetric advantage.<br /><br />But then, I think that about political donations and politician salaries and military spending, including for intelligence work, because you don't have to publish a spook's name to disclose "we're paying x in rent in Kabul at y number of locations", which doesn't give anybody anything except fiscal fucking accountability.<br /><br />*roughly, "rifling" is the way a gun's barrel spins the bullet, so that instead of wobbling around like a rock, it flies straight because the spin averages out the shape of the bullet, so that it has a consistent and equal forward momentum and wind resistance, rather than building up pressure on any one side the turning of the bullet averages to 'turning back to straight', like a football.&nbsp; This is done by 'firing' or 'pushing the bullet with an explosion' through a "rifled bore" or a "hole that's slightly too small for the bullet, so it is slightly squeezed, with slots cut in a spiral in that hole on the inside surface so that as the bullet goes through the hole it spins like a drill".&nbsp; Different bullets <br /><br />**Basically, it boils down to adding carbon atoms into an iron atom matrix, so that the bigger carbon with more bonds binds to the iron the same way, but stretches the bonds so they are under stress- think of it like pulling a rubber band tight. How can this be done? with a chemical reaction, of course- the old way is to fill up a sheetmetal box with activated charcoal and the parts you want to harden, and then put on a metal lid and seal it from the outside air with clay, so that when you put the whole thing in a furnace and heat it up to about 1400 degrees farenheit- so hot that the emanating heat from the parts inside literally lets you see through the steel box- the carbon, without any oxygen to burn with, accumulates a lot of energy to bond with, and begins to bond ferociously with the surface of the iron, a bit like the carbon version of rust, except that instead of causing the iron atoms to flake off, the carbon compacts them together under differential pressure- it's pulling with different amounts of force on different atoms, which is in turn putting pressure on the atoms surrounding it, a bit like stretching the corner of a spiderweb, or drawing a bowstring.Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-16286889795673148262017-05-29T15:42:00.002-07:002017-05-29T15:43:33.023-07:00I started a store!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kqhF8sKAqgg/WSyjoD1I9OI/AAAAAAAAAFQ/11NNWj01LtkIWFnRRydZPeIGpIrlkAR0ACLcB/s1600/18673193_1207712599356782_7095578605724868789_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="890" data-original-width="1000" height="284" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kqhF8sKAqgg/WSyjoD1I9OI/AAAAAAAAAFQ/11NNWj01LtkIWFnRRydZPeIGpIrlkAR0ACLcB/s320/18673193_1207712599356782_7095578605724868789_o.jpg" title="www.raspberrypiranha.com" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />I've started a store to sell Raspberry Pi stuff! The list is being populated, but it's up and ready for sale now! Check it out at www.RaspberryPiranha.com!Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-85856132853887778542017-05-29T10:38:00.001-07:002017-05-29T10:38:11.085-07:00Sun Tracking Steam Turbine!What the fuck is this, and why should you give a shit?<br /><br />&nbsp;This is a power-generating steam turbine that anyone can make with standard commodity parts, which I am developing to sell but also open sourcing so that other people can also copy and sell it.&nbsp; Mine will be a particularly nice version for sale with a target price of $500 and an output of 500 kw, meaning it can make a substantial dent in the average house bill for all the time it can run.&nbsp;<br /><br />The applications can vary- I am somewhat envisioning these being installed at the peaks of roofs on homes and so on, since they are relatively small and unobtrusive and could generate substantial power without changing the look of a house substantially (unlike standard solar panels), but it could also be used to expand the power generating capacity of some other kind of solar array, and there are two additional important footnotes about function: <br /><br />First, part of the intent is to allow these units to be chained together, producing far greater amounts of steam, with which they can run conventional coal-fire power plant steam turbines, with minimal investment, and only moderate changes to the plumbing and architecture of those buildings.<br /><br />Second, the use of steam with these units is not confined to power generation.&nbsp; For various applications, I could forsee steam being used to accelerate decomposition and breakdown of organic wastes (such as in biogas digesters, or other things such as biodeisel), being used to desalinate seawater for drinking without the conventional overhead of fuel costs, and there are almost certainly other obvious and easy applications to use this on that I have not yet thought of.<br /><br />So, this project is based around a few fundamental assumptions and an approach based on them.<br /><br /><ol><li>While superior in terms of the lack of moving parts, solar power from the photo-electric has a barrier of production; the average person can't produce silicon crystals in their garage, or from basic machined parts up in the mountains somewhere remotely.<br /></li><li>While inferior in terms of longevity, moving parts can be reasonably well made by the average person if they have the right tools to do this with and the knowledge of how to set about this practically, and so a solar power solution that relies on some mechanical conversion of energy, while imperfect, is exponentially more implementable by normal people without heavy expensive and dangerous specialized equipment.</li></ol><br /><a name='more'></a>So, what is my idea? Below is an illustration to show, roughly, what I'm hoping the assembled first generation of DIY prototypes look like.&nbsp; The left frame shows a boxy structure on top of a bucket, and on the right the boxy structure is pointed upwards at 45 degrees, revealing a cylinder inside.&nbsp; There is no visual indication, but the front of these boxes hold a fresnel lens, which is a way of taking a big round lens and making it a lot of flat pieces of that same lens shape, but on a clear sheet, arranged in concentric circles. <br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bwqa5PW5gwY/WSvY0OklvfI/AAAAAAAAAEQ/nEUUbZqYEHgi_HbfemqzF6b1xGg5_wfrACLcB/s1600/OAL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="346" data-original-width="519" height="213" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bwqa5PW5gwY/WSvY0OklvfI/AAAAAAAAAEQ/nEUUbZqYEHgi_HbfemqzF6b1xGg5_wfrACLcB/s320/OAL.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>&nbsp;The cylinder, visible interior to the box structures on the right, is made of aluminum, with a coil of copper tubing through it.<br /><br />The lens I've just described focuses sunlight onto this block of aluminum by turning left and right on the bucket, and moving the lens up and down.<br /><br />On the front, you can see a small access door to let you reach the interior portion: Inside, there is a turbine, a pump, 2 motors, a computer, a controller to interface between the computer's lower voltage and the motor's higher voltage, and a transformer to turn the electricity this generates into the electricity coming out of your wall's outlets- and in fact, that's the normal way to put it in, so when you run this, you plug it into your house's wall, and it supplies the power on the electrical grid- it literally spins your meter backwards.<br /><br />Does the turbine sound complex? It's about as complex as a metal hockey puck. Here is a picture to illustrate one of my early thoughts on it: <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9TD1ABUQNuI/WSviDfmsTtI/AAAAAAAAAEk/hPymhA4vOqEIJE4JwcKVxbpwkYgsgSmVwCLcB/s1600/TurbineSketch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1280" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9TD1ABUQNuI/WSviDfmsTtI/AAAAAAAAAEk/hPymhA4vOqEIJE4JwcKVxbpwkYgsgSmVwCLcB/s320/TurbineSketch.jpg" width="256" /></a></div>Now, this is not much like what the final design will be, but there are three important elements here.&nbsp; First, center, is a disc with small holes around the rim; that is the 'hockey puck' I mentioned. Second, the box below it; this is a box to hold steam pressure in.&nbsp; The box is important because it equalizes steam pressure across the holes on the actual outside of the turbine body, so that instead of being pushed unevenly from one side, the hockey puck is pushed with balance from all sides.&nbsp; The box is also important because it allows steam from multiple sources to all power the turbine.&nbsp;<br /><br />The third important part is the square with a circle with a star shape in it- a doodle of the coil arrangements to be held in place on a jig that set them in place in plastic that forms a gasket, sealing the turbine with the magnets as close as possible to the coils in that gasket, but with sufficient thickness that a misfire of the turbine won't cause a critical malfunction and shutdown. The intention is for the venting of the steam into the turbine chamber to create a boundary layer between the turbine body and the actual rotor itself.<br /><br />All of which sounds complicated, but bear in mind, the parts list for this is shit from home depot, walmart, or amazon.&nbsp; Sand and kitty litter form a casting sand that allow you to cast sophisticated metal parts; there is already a venerable series of books, called "The Gingery Home Workshop", that document how to take this fact and turn it into a full set of functioning machine tools, without using any to make them. Since things have come along a bit since then, I'm not quite sure what form this will take, but it will involve a combination of conventional machine tools and interchangeable CNC components running on various Raspberry Pi configurations.<br /><br />My intention is to use this sort of technology, as distilled as possible, as a practical basis for the desperate to have a shot at something without needing help.&nbsp; Remember, I'm the fucking ex-missionary here, my introduction to this problem was with 1) my conservative Christian upbringing's fundamental set of assumptions about being an oppressed minority actively assaulted in literal culture wars (hey! look! Trump got elected! That's the first time I've seen an election everyone fucking lost!), and 2) my demographic of people I was trying to help with this stuff was the tribal groups in Burma who weren't being allowed into Thailand as refugees (probably something to do with how many crossed the border illegally, and the meth trade, and the nature of racism in Thai culture), where the constraints were 1) lack of metal tools, electricity, education, and basically most levels of industrialization, 2) assholes, frequently heavily drugged up assholes on meth and heroine because they're trying to dull the sensation of having been child soldiers, are trying to kill you all the time, and 3) all the normal daily hazards of literally living in the fucking jungle. <br /><br />Essentially, I want to make a "civilization in a box", a costco 10-gallon tote size box that contains everything you need to rebuild human culture after a nuclear apocalypse or asteroid impact, or that could let you grow all the food you'd need or want to eat on mars, and allow you to produce the stuff to create your electricity, treat your waste, collect and treat your water and grow your food.<br /><br />So, this is a pretty good start, I think. it's mostly a flat-pack, all of the software and hardware is open source.<br /><br />To round this out, here are a handful of other pictures of the various components I've been making and testing for use on this project.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BA5wsZuuBLQ/WSxXW0g9zNI/AAAAAAAAAE0/SlhfbGLgadcalXUlbsRUy1MS53nenrs5ACEw/s1600/coil1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1112" data-original-width="1229" height="289" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BA5wsZuuBLQ/WSxXW0g9zNI/AAAAAAAAAE0/SlhfbGLgadcalXUlbsRUy1MS53nenrs5ACEw/s320/coil1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>&nbsp;This is the copper coil I described in the block of aluminum earlier.&nbsp; Remember, this is an open source component made from, in this case, quarter inch copper refrigeration coil tubing.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-r6hMe5KqdfM/WSxXcKzwv7I/AAAAAAAAAE4/TJXGk5hrc_8Eg2h3a5fZki2jMN9oNBeVQCEw/s1600/mock1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1080" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-r6hMe5KqdfM/WSxXcKzwv7I/AAAAAAAAAE4/TJXGk5hrc_8Eg2h3a5fZki2jMN9oNBeVQCEw/s320/mock1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>&nbsp;This is the fresnel lens to collect the sunlight, using a section of pegboard for a frame to&nbsp; mount it on, and two peieces of threaded rod to literally bolt it all together.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-i2lROLu2ncU/WSxXcYnEhrI/AAAAAAAAAFA/faj12i76Am4v-5AXWbwSuZy0-ztgU-ImwCEw/s1600/17126790_265368670541695_724451585723203584_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1350" data-original-width="1080" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-i2lROLu2ncU/WSxXcYnEhrI/AAAAAAAAAFA/faj12i76Am4v-5AXWbwSuZy0-ztgU-ImwCEw/s320/17126790_265368670541695_724451585723203584_n.jpg" width="256" /></a></div>&nbsp;This is an early pre-wired controller.&nbsp; The current version looks somewhat different, not least for being smaller, and the final version will not use that specific battery (which is literally junk I found on a street corner)<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fGl9aQG_Kds/WSxXcNETGJI/AAAAAAAAAE8/bGX84JZ4VkU3VdC-l993e3G5Ru8VRnadQCEw/s1600/15876782_161495157671293_6252594401466384384_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fGl9aQG_Kds/WSxXcNETGJI/AAAAAAAAAE8/bGX84JZ4VkU3VdC-l993e3G5Ru8VRnadQCEw/s320/15876782_161495157671293_6252594401466384384_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Finally, here is one of the earliest specific sketches of this thing. It's a very different sort of assembly, but you can see a crudely drawn fresnel lens, center, a boundary turbine with the short stack of disks above a cylinder below that, a copper tubing-in-aluminum block heat collector to its' left between it and the coils, and various other small pieces I envisioned assembling into something like what looks like the spot light at the top right, except of course the intent isn't to be a spot lighter, so much as a light spotter.<br /><br />Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-81660231951833961832017-05-28T17:16:00.001-07:002017-05-28T17:16:21.469-07:00Lots to update!So, why the radio silence? What's been going on?<br /><ul><li>an infuriating amount of nothing to report, followed by</li><li>getting hired at a startup to install cameras before being assigned to build a pot-growing robot army, and then when I'd moved and gotten kids set up so I could really start kicking ass, they showed me the door, and I left with my own working robot that I'd developed for them in my bag that day.</li><li>an escape from the lowest depths of poverty into the next step up (a struggle which continues, but thanks to services like Uber and Postmates, I'm actually free of bosses and self-funding!)</li><li>the acquisition of a trailer upon which to build a Tiny house- build series coming soon!</li><li>the founding of a site to sell Raspberry Pi electronics with the aim of training and equipping mad scientists everywhere (www.RaspberryPiranha.com)</li><li>Further developments on the state of the <b>sun-tracking steam turbine project</b>, the <b>farmbot project</b>, and the <b>Torrent project</b>, which will be expanded upon here in more detail</li><li><b>The Dadiot Podcast and Youtube Channels!</b> I will be recording episodes where guests and I do mad science, exploring deep problems to the deepest practically applicable depths we can in a day, ideally while high on marijuana. Slated projects include food foraging, wireless network wardriving, glass blowing, movie stunts and stunt fighting, computer vision, a build series on the steam turbine, farmbot, and other raspberry pi devices for sale on the raspberry piranha store. </li><li>This blog will be transferred over to a new site some point in the (hopefully near) future, and the contents of this blog will contain the notes, references, and externally hosted image accounts will be linked to and on display for visual aid or entertainment.<br /></li><li>Oh yeah, I want to go back and edit some of my shitty writing too.</li></ul>Hope y'all motherfuckers have been happily proceeding about your respective kickings of asses in my absence. Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-25106374099138234102016-09-22T09:58:00.001-07:002016-09-22T09:58:30.199-07:00In which I am sent to Thailand to be a short term missionary as a punishment for getting drunk and waking up in the hospital.So, this is approximately late August or early September in Idaho- I honestly don't remember the date.&nbsp; I am a fat delusional 19-year-old who's spending his waking hours reading books, lifting weights, and playing video games, going to his first ever house party where I am served alcohol.<br /><br />Needless to say, I went a little nuts.<br /><br />So the party goes off, the guy who brought me disappears- apparently out into the hills to get drunker and fight with whoever wanted a go, but I can only vouch for the guy ever getting drunk in my presence. I, unaware of what being drunk feels like, continue to drink well after that point.&nbsp; In the course of an evening, a large bottle of vodka mostly disappears, and one of my last clear memories is of taking a large swig toward the bottom of that bottle, having done my share to help put away most of it, and some whisky, everclear, gin, kalua, bourbon, and probably other things that were lost on me at the time.<br /><br />After that, the next thing I remember is coming to in the hospital and apologizing profusely to the nurses and saying "you guys should really be helping people, not dealing with this shit".&nbsp; Shortly thereafter, the humiliation intensifies as my dad shows up with his friend, who was at the time my jujitsu instructor, and who was coaching me in physical fitness, and he's this brilliant engineer with a ton of patents and all this shit.&nbsp; I didn't put such words to it at the time, and it was certainly nobody's intention to do this, but part of the cringe factor of looking back on an event like this comes from being at your lowest and most humiliating low- the drunk underage idiot evicted by ambulance from a friend's house party, and my dad shows up with this guy who's a huge role model really made me painfully aware of how badly I'd fucked up.<br /><br />One of those situations. But I was really surprised by how quiet the guy was. Looking back I suspect he has his own perspective on benders, but he's a boisterous, rambunctious gregarious guy, and so his quietness seemed odd that day.<br /><br />Anyway, that day wound up being the 24 hours to sober up my dad gave me- I think I sarcastically counted out the 30 hours it took for an actual conversation to happen- and then my Dad sat me down in the living room, and I think my mother was also there but my memory isn't perfect, and he said "OK, so this was a cry for help".&nbsp; And he proceeded to explain how my Aunt, his sister, could take me on for a year if I were going to art school there, which seemed like a good option at the time, as I'd just, in a few months, been fired from a lucrative industrial photo editing job I had<span style="font-size: xx-small;">1</span>, and had given up on the degree I'd pursued for a few semesters at a local college- game design<span style="font-size: xx-small;">2</span>.&nbsp;<br /><br />So, on the basis of moving further away, I chose Thailand. Which entailed being a missionary- and I, as a frustrated "athiest", said "fuck it" and decided it was better to be an atheist missionary than a 19 year old living in his parent's back yard shed. One of the amazingly frustrating and condescending shitty things that drove that was being banned from a forum where I was admittedly an ass, but partly on the basis that the people there took me to be a Christian troll, when I was genuinely- if stupidly- an atheist and on their side and just not up to speed. Because my upbringing had left with lots of really severe science denialist bullshit, which in retrospect seems more the result of the environment my parents chose for me, rather than anything to do with the views of my parents themselves.<br /><br />Why a missionary? why that? Well, it was something my parents came up with as what they thought was a good opportunity, because my mom's younger brother, of course, had married a Thai nurse who was going to the Laotian church he attended near his house, her younger rabidly Christian brother wanted a white person to come help his missionary friends<span style="font-size: xx-small;">3 <span style="font-size: small;">teach English.</span></span><br /><br />This point bears examining for some people; Thailand is a country that is a study in contradictions, and one of those contradictions is the idea that while Thailand, that is, the Thai people culturally, as I interacted with them, would utterly reject the notion of justifying anything on the basis of race, but still point to the darkness of the skin of criminals (never mind that it is the same darkness of skin as the majority of the Thai population!)- the correlation is not so much that anybody is better by birth, but that if you are less educated, less looked after, your skin gets darker because you work in the sun more.&nbsp; This bias is leveraged by their culture, in their famous hospitality, as a more or less universal "benefit of a doubt" that is more easily granted to lighter foreigners than darker ones- Thai people have had no shortage of interactions between all of civilization between the pacific and Indian oceans, as Thailand, for approximately the last 700 years<span style="font-size: xx-small;">4.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">In practice, this means that Thailand is, or at least can be, an easy place to integrate for lighter skinned people, and indeed, historically and today this has been and continues to be borne out- there are more Thai-Chinese families, where Chinese men<span style="font-size: xx-small;">5 <span style="font-size: small;">have married Thai women, than there are in neighboring countries like Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Burma, and so on.&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></span></span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">White people end up with a similar bias- maybe it has to do with the history of colonialism in southeast asia, and the resistance to it by Thailand<span style="font-size: xx-small;">6,<span style="font-size: small;">&nbsp; Whatever the origin of it is, the generic stereotypical perception, by Thais of westerners, is that they are, or at least have the chance to be, well educated, fabulously wealthy, and that for all this we tend to be a bit oafish and clumsy with the expected social niceties, and so charity must be granted to us for our differences in order to properly accommodate a relationship that might become beneficial.</span></span></span></span></span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">&nbsp;But nonetheless, we speak English natively, and being able to communicate with us is a solid cachet of points in the pecking order of Thai society, and so there is always a demand for white native English speakers.&nbsp; Particularly, since Thai society is rather sexually conservative, and the appetites of foreign men have led to an entirely different reputation abroad, for white native English speaking <i>women</i>, who won't try to fuck all the teachers and janitors at a given school that hires them quite so often as the white native English speaking men seem to.</span></span><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">As a white guy, ostensibly a missionary- I was, again, an atheist, but not "out" to my family, I wasn't quite a white woman, but being a missionary- as long as you're relatively straightforward about that, and I was- is considered a pretty good second best, at least by the sort of people without better options, who don't know better, or who are otherwise Christian themselves already.</span></span><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">And so my adventure began, about a month after that hangover, with a 30 hour plane ride to no bed, no air conditioning, no heated showers, no toilet paper, no sitting toilets, and no food that was available to be had in any language I spoke. I promptly enrolled in a Thai language school and began rapidly acquiring Thai, getting my bearings, and learning my way around. two weeks after I landed, I was told by that missionary family I was supposed to teach English with that "We don't want you, you speak too fast."</span></span><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">And I was cut loose to do nothing and find my own way.&nbsp;</span></span><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been if I'd left those idiots and done something besides study theology. </span></span><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">&nbsp;</span>&nbsp;</span> <br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;">1 - - - - In the course of processing hundreds of images, I processed things faster than anybody they'd ever seen, but with an error rate that was unacceptable</span><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;">2 - - - - Because the coding, in Visual Basic 6 and in preparation for Visual Basic.Net, was too painful.&nbsp; I have never quite forgiven Microsoft for what it did to Basic as a result, and that debacle itself turned into one of my earliest sequential forrays into the discipline of programming- but that's a story for another day.&nbsp; Suffice it to say, <br /><br />there once was a language called Basic,&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;">It was a marvelous script to write pong &lt;sic&gt;, <br />When in Microsoft trucked,</span><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;">and the other scripts ducked,</span><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;">And Basic was Basically<span class="st" data-hveid="51">™</span>&nbsp; fucked.</span><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;">3 - - - - a North Korean-American family, and literal cousins to the Kim dynasty there.&nbsp; Fitting, kind of. It sheds a lot of light on the country when you learn that the leading monarch/godhead was a protestant preacher's kid, and that there's still a continuing successions of preachers kids with their own cult outside those borders.</span><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;">4 - - - -&nbsp; Perspective, is about the age of the kingdom AND the time that one of it's dynasties- at the time, I think it was siriyothai- first established formal relations with Korea, a years-long nautical voyage away. Formal relationships ended during the warring states period in Japan, because neither country could get ships around what was the Japanese pirates on one side, and the Mongolian and Chinese on the other, but this perspective has led me to ask the question: Is kimchi the Korean recreation of Som Tam, as it would be after a years-long nautical journey to a foreign land during the iron age? Is it, in fact, a faithful korean recreation of a highly esteemed but perishable foreign delicacy?&nbsp; It fucking isn't, but now all the white people reading this are googling both those things, all the Thai people are laughing and all the Koreans are saying "What the fuck is Som Tam?"</span><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;">&nbsp;5 - - - - This one is a weird historical detail, particularly, since Imperial China didn't allow women to travel, in order to anchor its male citizens to China by family, which is why Chinese men being able to marry outside of China at all was a big deal- just think about how unpopular they were in <i>your</i> country at the time, and then ask how many of them were getting laid.</span><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;">6 - - - - </span><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Really, the use, by France and England, of Thailand as a 'buffer state' between French Indochina and the British Indian Territories, which at the time, extended East into Burma, making Thailand a natural border between the two colonial empires, and sparing Thailand an ugly share of the most disgraceful histories of those two states </span>Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-40436491923973607502016-09-21T11:23:00.001-07:002016-09-21T11:23:32.795-07:00What is an Earthship, and why should I give a shit?<br />So, what is an Earthship?<br /><br />An Earthship is a house.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br /><br />It's a house that requires no power to run, which produces food, heats and cools itself, collects rain water for drinking water, and treats the sewage that is the byproduct of human use of that water and food.&nbsp; <i>In this way, above and beyond merely being houses, Earthships are highly engineered passive human-sustaining habitats.</i><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://static.highexistence.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/earthship2-625x377.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="193" src="https://static.highexistence.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/earthship2-625x377.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Convection_banner_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="124" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Convection_banner_1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />But houses already exist! All of these problems already have solutions, most or all of which are still accessible! Why does this matter <i>at all?</i><br /><br /><i>Because Earthships can be made to do this in any environment on earth, using locally sourced materials that are normally considered garbage, such as discarded cans, bottles, and tires. Thus, they not only represent an emerging technology set that can and will outcompete our current house building technology, they are a sustainable solution, and one that is deliverable as humanitarian aid, for maximum benefit, with minimum investment.</i><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://d1p42fqrbwqdsw.cloudfront.net/campaigns/background_images/000/009/361/web/980969_10153414932555497_602886605_o.jpg?1393646478" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="206" src="https://d1p42fqrbwqdsw.cloudfront.net/campaigns/background_images/000/009/361/web/980969_10153414932555497_602886605_o.jpg?1393646478" width="320" /></a></div><br /><i><br /></i><br /><u><b>Earthships are <i>beautiul</i> state-of-the-art homes which require little or no infrastructure and have little or no overhead</b></u>. <u><i><b>Made of garbage</b></i></u>.<br /><br />So, the above portion is largely rhetoric, and not actionable or useful, so here I'll describe a 'basic' earthship and list examples of this set of technology in action and explain some of the points about it.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/d8/9f/40/d89f40e5b5457678fdb58707ece893d8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/d8/9f/40/d89f40e5b5457678fdb58707ece893d8.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/31/89/a2/3189a2fc10db1bc1ffa67cb6f6112d30.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/31/89/a2/3189a2fc10db1bc1ffa67cb6f6112d30.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><b>What does an earthship look like?</b>&nbsp; Any house can look like an earthship, but there is a 'classic' model that most draw elements from.&nbsp; Earthships are always oriented to use the sun, and so in the northern hemisphere face south, and in the southern, north.&nbsp; The sun-facing sides are usually built as green houses with solid stone or rammed earth floors to catch the heat from the sun in a deliberately warmed portion of the house. At the top of these green houses are vent windows that allow hot air to blow out.&nbsp; Behind the greenhouse portion is the house proper- these are typically long linear structures built into the side of a hill, with tire walls forming the outer boundary and smaller dividing walls inside to allocate the space into rooms.&nbsp; Over the top is a typically shallowly sloped roof, also typically covered in sheet metal painted a single coherent color (as a cheap, efficient, durable, light, and non-contaminating way to funnel the rain water into the collection system), which are typically on the north (in the northern hemisphere) side of the house, but which can be located just about anywhere. Typically, to keep them out of sight and mind, the water tanks that the rain water is stored in are under ground, although this is not always the case.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://earthshiprising.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/20141014_174944.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://earthshiprising.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/20141014_174944.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Waybee earthship in Taos, NM, draws on the local Spanish and Adobe influences.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />Beyond this, there aren't any real features to conclusively identify a building as an earthship or not. I say, your house can probably be turned into one, and figuring out how to make that happen is one direction of my research into these.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8514/8462027719_4cfbc2d909.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8514/8462027719_4cfbc2d909.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tire walls being built.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><b>Why tires?</b>&nbsp; Because tires are steel-reinforced hoops of rubber casing that never decays, or for all practical purposes will never decay in the span of a human life.&nbsp; Because of this, they are a special challenge for our waste disposal infrastructure, or else new uses need to be found for them.<br /><br />In earthships, tires are used to make large rammed-earth 'bricks' to build heavy foundations and structural components.&nbsp; A piece of cardboard is put in the tire to initially keep the dirt from falling out of the bottom, and then the tire is filled with dirt.&nbsp; When it is filled as full as can be, a sledge hammer is used to pack the dirt into the walls of the tire, and more dirt is added and then packed until the tire wall bulges on all sides equally. At this point, the pressure of the tire squeezing the dirt is sufficient to render it a single solid building block- for a normal (26 inch) tire, these will typically weigh 300 to 500 pounds.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/d2/60/11/d26011962a60d9f7701be86ea7f2f225.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/d2/60/11/d26011962a60d9f7701be86ea7f2f225.jpg" width="228" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A field of discarded tires, Kuwait.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><u>Why is this good?</u>&nbsp; First, tires are cheap, even free- and in many cases, you can even make money by charging some small amount for people to dispose of them with you, although this depends on the environment and part of the world you find yourself in.&nbsp; Second, because they are so wide, they do not legally require a concrete slab foundation under them, and so they can be used as a building material and meet building codes, even if some more antiquated building code systems may not have specific named provisions for these (which will change, eventually).&nbsp; Third, because these tires and dirt together have a lot of mass crammed very densely together, they absorb and retain heat very well- an effect which is capitalized on to passively drive convective heating and cooling to provide climate control in earthships- which, admittedly, can be done many ways with many materials besides tires, but of the available set of materials used in this sort of construction, tires represent an extremely cheap, convenient, accessible, and useful way to implement this.<br /><br />One final note about tires: I can't make extravagant claims yet, but I am examining the potential of rammed earth tires as structural components for large scale civil engineering applications, and the future here seems bright. I suspect properly buttressed tire structures that use rebar to distribute load across all of the structure could see tire arches (as in, weight-bearing bridges made from tires), sky scrapers, dams and levies, and so on. There are great possibilities.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://66.media.tumblr.com/13572896da575563e94ecfa920e32760/tumblr_mgolnr4lBK1s3ugtho1_1280.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://66.media.tumblr.com/13572896da575563e94ecfa920e32760/tumblr_mgolnr4lBK1s3ugtho1_1280.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><b>Bottles... as bricks? WTF?</b>&nbsp; Well, first, that needs to be qalified- <b>no</b>, you don't just slap some concrete on a bottle and call it a brick. What actually happens to make these is that the neck and shoulder of two matching bottles are cut off, the resulting 'cups' of the bottom of the bottle are washed and dried, and then they are put top-to-top and the seam between them is wrapped in duct tape, creating a hollow cylindrical 'brick'.<br /><br />The way these 'bottle bricks' get used is <i>NOT</i> as a structural component, but rather as a weight-reducing component.&nbsp; By adding a bottle to a cob, adobe, or cement wall, you are reducing the amount of mass required to make that wall, and reducing the weight of the wall at the same time.&nbsp; By using bottle bricks to do this, you can arrange them in patterns, constellations, and even make what look like mosaics of stained glass.&nbsp;&nbsp; The effect of sunlight on a brown bottle such as a beer bottle is to render them a red-orange; green glass becomes a more brilliant shade of emerald. And so, even though these are sourced from discarded materials, they result is an easy to make and aesthetically pleasing little jewel of a window that can let additional light into your house while making it lighter and more structurally sound.&nbsp; These are particularly popular in bathrooms, where more light but less outside visibility is usually desirable.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://operationgroundswell.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/EarthBench2-1024x768.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://operationgroundswell.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/EarthBench2-1024x768.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Plastic bottle bricks being laid in Kenya.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><b>Then what about can walls? what about plastic bottles?</b>&nbsp; These are essentially the same idea- reducing the total input of building material, reducing the total weight of the wall- and by dint of using disposable garbage to take up the space that various sorts of mud might otherwise have to occupy. Aluminium drink cans, particularly, tend to have solid uniform bottoms and tops, and these make for very good building materials that it is possible to make very interesting geometric patterns, while plastic bottles have the advantage of being very easy to work with using even simply a knife, and some of the more environmentally conscious earthshippers have taken to filling these plastic bottles with additional volumes of plastic garbage to use it up, dispose of it, and create denser filling material all in one go.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://inspirationalvillage.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/p1010045.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://inspirationalvillage.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/p1010045.jpg" width="320" /></a><a href="http://static.highexistence.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/earthship2-625x377.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="193" src="https://static.highexistence.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/earthship2-625x377.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br /><br /><br /><b>Collecting Rainwater</b> is the next concept to understand. In an Earthship, rain water is harvested via the gutters funnelling the rain that lands on the roof into a filtration and storage system that stores a finite portion of all rain that lands on the house.&nbsp; If the system fills to capacity, it simply does not store any more and the rain flows off the house and over the collection onto the ground and into the water table as it normally would, without interruption.<br /><br />Once rain water is collected, there are four primary uses for it.&nbsp; First, it is filtered and made available to the primary treated water plumbing of the house, to be available for drinking, cooking, etc.&nbsp; Second, the water that goes down the drain from this is fed into the green house at the south side of the house.&nbsp; Third, once it has fed the botanical cell there (which removes the solids and organic compounds from the water), it is used as the water to flush the toilet for the house septic system. Fourth, once it has been flushed, it is put into a septic digester to first sterilize and break the amonia compounds down into nitrates and nitrites, and then this resulting nutrient mixture is pumped into a botanical cell outside the house, where it can be used to drive landscaping or can be used for further gardening, from a contained cell that will not pollute the water table or lose moisture content too rapidly if the water table is too low, such as in especially arid regions.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br /><br /><b>Food Production, and what the heck is a "Botanical Cell"?</b>&nbsp; So, in the green house, the premise is that a deliberately engineered human ecosystem can passively do the work that would otherwise require machines, investment, and human labor: they can clean shit out of water, for given values of 'clean' and 'shit'.<br /><br />What does this mean? It means that, in the area that is the entrance to these houses, no matter what the climate or weather might be outside, there is usually a garden that is established around the time the house is built which continues to produce indefinitely.&nbsp; I have seen banana trees, fig trees, tomatoes, strawberries, all manners of herb and spice, and many other things grown in such settings.&nbsp; Because the green house is the portion of the house which collects and accumulates heat to drive the passive heating (and cooling) systems, keeping plants- even tropical plants- at temperatures which they will produce fruit requires no action to be taken after planting.&nbsp; Since it is an indoor environment, there isn't weeding to do; as long as there is somebody at the location occasionally using the sink and flushing the toilet, there will be water delivered to these botanical cells- no manual watering is ever required.<br /><br />The outdoor botanical cells are essentially the same idea, but are separated <i>because</i> the source of the water is from the black water / septic system.&nbsp; It isn't that there is no capacity to clean this to the point that it couldn't be used indoors, but as a way of meeting code, preventing problems associated with clogs and backups, even though these work essentially the same way, the one inside the earth ship is usually just cleaning soap and tooth paste out of the water, rather than less savory components. <br /><br /><b>This is the tip of a very large iceberg.</b><br /><br />To illustrate what urban food production looks like, lets take tomato plants. In an environment that supports them in doing so, they will grow indefinitely. A well established year-old tomato plant, producing beef steak tomatoes, will produce them in bunches of what look, at first glance, exactly like cherry tomato bunches, with each tomato being 10 times the size of a cherry tomato.&nbsp; Here's one that's 50 weeks old (two weeks short of a year), 24 feet long, still producing fruit, and still growing, pointed out about halfway through this video. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e44kzwzBNek">Check it out.</a><br /><br /><u><b>Further Data:</b></u><br /><ul><li>Garbage Warrior, a documentary that was made to comprehensively explain this topic by the actual Earthship people. On Yootoob <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_y8XWgRECE">here</a>. </li><li>A <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2F1YSP2f_U">house tour</a>, to give some context to what a conventional function-first earthship would look something like&nbsp;</li><li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlijB6G392Q">Here</a> is an excellent look at some of the features, design principles, and operating constraints of the building methods described here. </li></ul>Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-82797895322424494382016-02-11T10:58:00.002-08:002016-02-11T10:58:21.791-08:00Losing my virginity in Kon Kaen- Part 1Now, I will freely admit that this is an unusual topic to waste people's time with- but so many of the topics here have been, and you're here anyway. And since it is an eye-catching detail in perhaps the most bizarre and illustrative trip I took during my time in Thailand, I want to detail it here, as much for myself as for you, because it is a memory worth sharing.<br /><br />Now, this story needs a bit of setup. You should know how, by this time, I was living in Thailand doing missionary work. Now, in the pursuit of this, I wanted a visa that I could live in the country of Thailand with, and by far the easiest and most useful sort of Visa to get for my purposes was an educational visa. It let you stay in the country for a year, reporting to the Thai national immigration authorities every 90 days about your whereabouts in the country, etc.<br /><br />So, to get this visa, I - first- went to Burma, extending the length of time I had on my tourist visa.&nbsp; 2 days, by bus, and an overnight stay. After that I crashed for a day, and then got on a bus to go to bangkok- mistakenly thinking I had to request a visa from the central office in Thailand where these are actually recorded.<br /><br />Back to the drawing board! I finally, after a bit of research, managed to figure out what was intuitively obvious to everyone but me- Thai visas come from Thai embassies in <i>other</i> countries- and bitterly accepted that I'd have to leave Thailand.<br /><br />Once I communicated this to my uncle Mee (1), and Goi (2) his then-fiance, they managed to attach me to a group tour of Thailand that took me down south- again- this time on the most obnoxious bus ride I've ever been on ever. I want to make this clear from the outset- the people were lovely, and very accomodating, and generous, and kind, and I have the utmost respect for them- but traditional Thai music, when it encountered militaristic polka in the early 20th century, gave birth to Thai country music- music that is both infinitely obnoxious and infinitely boring. If migraines had a beat, it would be that "bok bok bok" of a wooden block being hit for the exact same rhythm in every song- except that, more often than not, the guy doing it was off the beat <i>just enough</i> to make every "bok" land on the ears at the least welcome moment.&nbsp; Coupled with that that a packed bus left little room, a long trip left no time to stretch, and the air conditioning being blasted at full strength kept everyone freezing.<br /><br />We get down south, and it's... tourist town- but it's a Thai tourist town. At the time, remember, I was still coming to grips with the Thai language and really learning the vocabulary- to this day I don't know the name of that place (3).&nbsp; We spent the night in a very basic accommodation- literally a single room for about 20 people, all sleeping on what we'd call gym mats in the US, sharing a single bathroom. It was a cold room, again, but it warmed up when it filled up.&nbsp; I still remember wandering out at perhaps 2 AM to see a handful of drunken tour operators each individually riding tandem bicycles that could have fit perhaps 10 people each in circles in front of this room.<br /><br />After that<span style="font-size: xx-small;">4</span> brief stint, Goi's family and I proceeded onwards to a mountain-top palace from the 1800s, with a healthy infestation of monkeys.&nbsp; A recently installed cable car took our group up to the top, and- at the behest of my uncle's father-in-law to be, I snapped a few technically-illegal photos of him and his friend near a beat-up looking chair which I suspect was a famous king's.<br /><br />&nbsp;The next stop on my trip was Bangkok- a brief lunch with the bus stewardess's son&nbsp;<span style="font-size: xx-small;">5</span>, where I got to see a bizarre swath of Thailand- a trip through at least two temples, and at least one palace, along riverboat ferries, and through several restaurants. My guides managed to greatly aide my pidgin Thai, and though it may sound like nothing, nobody wants to be the fuckup who can't tell the difference between "River" ("menam") and "oil" ("naman"), and after a brief chuckle where I asked for clarification, I learned that there's no mistake so silly that you can't move on from it <span style="font-size: xx-small;">6.</span><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><br /></span>From there, my trip took me by train to Udon Thani or thereabouts, on a Thai "Sleeper" train- there are seats that convert into lower bunks, and upper bunks that fold down. On a Thai train, this means that they will also attach a restaurant car, normally featuring a bar- standard fare everywhere- but it also means that enterprising citizens will roll cases of cold beer down the train to hock them for slightly better prices than the bar, as well as snacks, pre-boxed Thai food, and basically anything else that you might want. In some cases it's actually harder to avoid a 3-course meal and a hangover on a train than it is to find one. &nbsp;I managed to have a lovely conversation with a British man and a few beers, and then I borrowed a book of his for the night- we were both fans of military history and special ops fiction, he mentioned having even met Roy Boehm, who created the well known SEAL teams, and then the conversation foreshadowed my story a little bit when I mentioned losing a bunch of weight as a result of moving to Thailand, and he mentioned having gained a lot because he'd been here so long.<br /><br />I got off that train at about 7 in the morning in Nong Khai, an hour's drive from my cousin's house in Udon. I remember it as a cold gray misty morning, but it must have been about 70 degrees farenheit. &nbsp;My cousin, so this is clear, was a Thai man studying, at that time, to enter the Thai Royal Police- he has long since graduated with honors, but at the time, he was living in what I now call the "dead gecko house."<br /><br />Most people have heard of what's called a "Tokay Gecko". It's a large purplish white gecko that's a popular pet because they're tough critters that even incompetent pet enthusiast will have a hard time accidentally killing. &nbsp;They're so tough, in fact, that there are now huge wild populations of Tokay Geckos living in places like Florida- the descendants of escaped pets. Now, in the US, a big tokay is perhaps 12-15 inches long, or approximately 30-40 centimeters. &nbsp;The largest I've seen in the wild was at least two feet (60 centimeters), and I've caught ones that were approximately 18 inches (~45 cm) in rural areas of Thailand.<br /><br />In this house, in one room, there were- as best I can remember- about 3 dead Tokay geckos, and perhaps four or five living ones. &nbsp;I won't claim to remember everything perfectly, but I remember distinctly looking up at the ceiling of this dark room, perhaps 10-15 feet above my head, and seeing indistinct gray shadows that I recognized, and getting out my flashlight- an expensive Gerber LED light I was extremely proud of at the time, and have long since lost- and seeing, first the ones on the wall, and then looking around and seeing a skeleton tail hanging off the side of a "spirit house" <span style="font-size: xx-small;">7</span>, with the desiccated remains of the dead geckos I mentioned looking for all the world like enormous giant dried-up bugs on a windowsill.<br /><br />Now, I was nervous about my trip into Laos- my country, after all, had engaged in an extensive illegal bombing campaign there during its war with Vietnam, and I expected no warm reception for my nationality- which is generally what Americans expect, until they've been abroad, I think- based on my own limited experience. Perhaps it's not just us, but then, few countries have bombed so many others- even if we claim it was all legal now, that's not something to be proud of. Anyway, on that basis, I elected to leave my leatherman <span style="font-size: xx-small;">9</span> at my cousin's house, to pick up after I left Laos.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">10</span><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><br /></span>Now Laos... well, I don't know what was going on. I do know that several months later, there was a major change of government- but , while the city wasn't actually on any sort of lockdown I could detect, literally everything shut down at sunset, and the only people I saw out when I went out one evening to look for food, thinking it would be just like Thailand, the only people I saw were armed policemen, the only lights I saw were street lights and the lights from the hotel, and during that time I saw what looked like presidential convoys of big shiny black cars, surrounded by a guard of policemen on Harley Davidson motorcycles, with big shiny black limousines in the middle.<br /><br />The impression was of a city under siege. Something was happening, and I don't know what. But I did see lots of soldiers with guns- ancient underfolding AKM's, so worn that the bluing was gone and the guns were grey metal- and lots of policemen carrying ancient looking automatics- looking something like a makarov, but I can't positively ID that. I asked the staff at the hotel, and the only explanation I remember was essentially a hand wave and "politics".<br /><br />Much of my memory of that trip is of the insides of bathrooms- something there, maybe the water, maybe the food, maybe something else altogether, gave me the worst diarrhea I've had ever. &nbsp;The food was great- I remember a large bowl of what I'd call "kuay Tiaw" in Thai, with a large plate of moo satay and an excellent peanut sauce, and the som tam- everywhere! literally every place! was among the best somtam I've ever had. probably also loaded with MSG, but still delicious. And, thanks to French colonialism, baguettes were cheap, delicious, and plentiful, and I indulged often.<br /><br />Now, the trip was happening so that I could obtain an educational Visa to Thailand- and after a trip to the Thai embassy to get that left me on a wild goose chase to figure out what other endorsement I needed from my school, and why they needed an extra $250 for it, I went back several days later, they simply processed my paperwork- I didn't try to avoid the teller who had apparently been angling for a bribe, I just went up to the window with the same paperwork I'd had before and they processed me right away. Being able to actually do the paperwork meant I'd actually have to have the money in hand- and that meant a four hour ride on the city's tuk-tuks&nbsp;<span style="font-size: xx-small;">11 </span>to the only bank in Laos that I could actually withdraw money from, which brought me into contact with, first, the painful nature of sanctions and trade relations- because some shit just needs to work, like the economy, and in Laos, it doesn't. Or at least, at the time, it didn't. &nbsp;And second, it made me aware that there was more to Laos- that there were intelligent and successful people here who thrived in spite of sanctions, and without needing to kill everyone to do it. &nbsp;The impression I got of Laotians was that they were in the same boat, and knew it was a rough ride, and wouldn't begrudge helping each other if they could- and would understand if somebody didn't help them because they couldn't. <br /><br />All of this is underscored by memories of walking through shit-and-garbage-filled alley marketplaces, where people were selling food. Basic services weren't being done, in other words, or at a slower rate than should have been, and life had to go on anyway. So everybody cleaned as best they could, and cooked what they could, and the spices used so heavily also have antimicrobial effects, and so on. &nbsp;This was my first exposure to widespread subsistence poverty, and the problem I have obsessed over since then is how to address survival in this environment, and in the bare subsistence environments of the Karen tribes I saw in person even before this, and of the bare subsistence of the Lisu particularly later on.<br /><br />It's important to point that out, for a minute. That's why I was a missionary: That's how I wound up going to college in Thailand. &nbsp;When I say "My experience has not been typical", I'm generally trying to warn people that I made the bad decisions for reasons they shouldn't try to emulate, or that I got lucky in ways you should not count on. I should have died lots of times. &nbsp;But the common theme is recognizing this situation of the bulk of the human species, and wanting to use technology to solve those basic problems. So I learned to do stuff on the basis that the niceties of civilization could be re-implemented independently, in more elegant form, by these groups. &nbsp;I really hate how "holier than thou" it sounds, I'm just trying to do right by the people I knew and know, so that I'm not a total asshole.<br /><br />All this spun through my head as I looked over at the only other person exiting Laos at that time, and the manly part of my brain sat bolt upright and took due note of the milf <span style="font-size: xx-small;">12</span> at the other window.<br /><br />Now, I was leaving at an unusual time- it was early in the afternoon- and I hadn't secured transportation, and just vaguely knew I had to get back to Chiang Mai so that I could continue on my journey. However, there isn't a bus from Vientienne's immigration checkpoint to Chiang Mai, as that would be a 12 hour bus ride. I exited looking for a ride, and instead of the songthaews <span style="font-size: xx-small;">13</span> I was used to, discovered, to my surprise and delight, the milf had a car- when she offered me a ride to where she was going, several hours south.<br /><br />Now, I was a Christian attempting to be a missionary at the time, and I think that's an important angle to examine: how do I get duped into temptation? And the answer was: stupid Christian rules about chastity.&nbsp; See, girls aren't allowed to go anywhere alone in Thai Christian culture- they're expected to go in pairs, so that one acts as a chaperone, or in case one is injured or raped &lt;their actual explicit concern&gt;, the other one is able to assist or call for help. This woman didn't have anything like this; therefore, in my estimation, I was simply being gallant by offering.<br /><br />And yes, it sounds just as stupid to me saying it as it does to you, reading it. But that was my thought process at the time. <br /><br /><ol><li>Yes, it's pronounced exactly like the English word "me". If you're ever in a position where you have to actually say the fucking word and someone is getting confused, the memory trick of attaching something pleasant- like naked ladies- to the information, in this case the translation "Bear", using a phonetic pattern you intuitively recognize, can greatly assist your attempts at memorizing shit- and hey presto! My hardcore christian Thai uncle, "Bear naked ladies!".&nbsp; He'll hate this, but I think it kind of suits him.</li><li>"Pinky"</li><li>&nbsp;No, it wasn't fucking Pattaya. Pattaya, is for white people- and I was literally the only one in this place. This was a little stretch of cleared beach south of Bangkok. That's literally all I know. I think it may have been Sriracha, but that's literally based on glancing at the names on google earth.</li><li>Actually, that may have been before the beach- I remember both clearly, but am less clear on the order. They were only a bus trip apart, in either case, and that's how I remember them.</li><li>My life is filled with examples of human kindness by people who's names I wish I could remember, so that I could thank them. This couple- the stewardess's son, and his fiance- are exhibit A.</li><li>Unless it kills you.</li><li>"Spirit Houses" are an Asian phenomena that extend throughout southeast Asia, and the premise is that you buy a small house for the ghosts in your house- your ancestors, by default- and then give them stuff to make them happy so they'll leave you alone. In Thailand particularly, you'll see big spirit houses in front of places like hospitals, typically with equally large tables in front of them for the people's offerings- things like elephant figures<span style="font-size: xx-small;">8</span> in Thailand, but also small plastic figures- spiritual slaves, including sex slaves- and I've heard of people leaving model cars and so on for the spirits too.&nbsp;</li><li>An auspicious gift that says, "please boogyman, don't kill my friend/family member in this hospital!"</li><li>A really nice pocket knife with pliers that was a gift from a family friend when I left the US.</li><li>I wound up getting it back several months later, as my return trip didn't take me back that way. &nbsp;I kinda feel like I owe my cousin beer for that.</li><li>"Tuk-tuks" are the Thai description of what are described as "Rickshaws" in south Asia, I believe. They're a 3-wheeled vehicle, normally powered by Propane in Thailand, which have handlebars like a motorcycle to turn the front wheel, and a large reclining bench seat that can comfortably accommodate two people- and uncomfortably accommodate a lot more, especially if they are drunk.</li><li>Traditionally "Mother I'd like Fucking", in reference to both the age and the subjective attractiveness </li><li>"Song Thaew" is how you say "two rows" in Thai, and is the colloquial name for a type of public transportation consisting of a pickup truck chassis that has been modified to fit two bench seats into the back with a cover and windows over the top, and usually a cargo rack on top for carrying heavy goods. In different parts of Thailand, these act as Taxis, bus lines, and even agricultural goods shipping- it's not uncommon to see fleets of the red ones at markets at 3 AM filled to the brim with vegetables being unloaded for the day's sales.</li></ol>Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-83057187420201437092015-12-04T01:08:00.000-08:002016-02-11T11:00:41.133-08:00The logistics of spouse abuse: a primer on asymmetric warfareHow does it go? Here is a rough progression of how it went for me.<br /><br />I am a large white man. I currently stand 5'11" and weigh approximately 300 lbs.&nbsp; The smallest I have been in 10 years is 260 lbs.&nbsp; I was abused by a 5 foot 80 lbs Thai woman.<br /><br />How &lt;the fuck&gt;?<br /><br />See, here's the logic. I'm a big guy, and besides being absurdly fat, I'm pretty strong. Therefore, if the police are called, and it comes to light that I have hit a Thai woman, I'm pretty fucked.&nbsp; Since it's not us, but our annoyed neighbors, who might also call, I don't yell back.&nbsp; Because I don't have a visa, if this woman calls the cops, I will go to prison. It's no good that I speak Thai, and can probably sweet talk my way to a bribe and a bit of mercy; if you can't pay the bribe, you can't buy the mercy.<br /><br />And by this point, not only were we in business together, we'd had the first of our two children, and she'd been diagnosed with HIV- and I'd stayed with her, despite the obvious difficulties this caused.<br /><br />In case it's not clear from the outset, I was and am an idiot, but I try to have good reasons for the things I do.<br /><br />At the time this decision was first made, I was intensely and stupidly devoted to the Christian cult. When the positive diagnosis was first given, they explained that we had the option of having an abortion, and explained that with treatment, about 80% of the children born under these circumstances are uninfected.&nbsp; This takes into consideration the administration of antiretroviral drugs, and a special C- section surgery wherein the fetus and placenta are removed without rupturing the placenta, thereby not exposing the baby to any of its mother's infected blood. <br /><br />&lt;The placenta is a blood barrier, in case you're wondering about that; mother and child don't share blood. This is how a mother can give birth to a baby with a different blood type.&gt;<br /><br />All this spins in your head when you're doing the math and realizing your kid has a 1:5 chance of being fucked on the first day and living barely a few short miserable years, just the way I'd seen happening in some of the orphanages I'd volunteered at years earlier.<br /><br />and through all this, my mind centered on the observation that the odds of surviving abortion are 0%, not 80.<br /><br />And in that moment, my commitment was made. This was the woman I loved, she loved me, we were going to try to save some piece of her, even if she herself couldn't go on. So this is the level of commitment that I entered this asymmetric relationship with.We decided to try for the kid so that she could live on in some sense.<br /><br />Now, here is the setup for asymmetric warfare. I have no status in the country, no degree (because shortly after the initial diagnosis, I drop out of college to run the wine company she'd started and dragged me into. We do well financially for a little while. Then we have a fight, she insists she's caught me cheating via a conversation I had online with someone else.&nbsp; We have a big falling out, I resign myself to losing my son and the love of my life (as I still thought of her), and then she takes me back.<br /><br />So, this is how it begins. I am at her mercy to begin with, and then I am in this position as a result of it. If this were jujitsu, this move would be banned from competition sparring for being too dangerous. it's a neck-breaking choke hold.<br /><br />and so when the blows started falling, I bore it. When she kicked me out and called the cops- threatening me with prison, for imagined offenses, or over trifles- well, what choice did I have? I could bear this, even though I hated it, because I knew she had loved me, and even if she didn't, well, I loved our son enough to stay and take care of him.&nbsp; Or failing that, at least see that he was fed and educated.<br /><br />So this was the cycle I found myself in. We would fight, she would beat me with whatever she had near her, spit on me, scream, destroy my belongings. Anything she could do to inflict pain, she would do, because she thought she deserved to, or that I deserved to experience it.<u></u><br /><br />So this is how you make someone a zombie. You destroy their ability to be happy. You lure them back, and you destroy their ability to believe in happiness. You've fucked yourself, this is how the story ends.<br /><br />It already can't get worse- and then it does. And if it isn't because they themselves made it worse, then the things that made it worse stay that bad because the other person never moves on. So no sex becomes no touching.<br /><br />So I threw myself into work, when I could. I made several interrupted attempts at starting my own companies, the last iteration of which I am currently &lt;dec 2015&gt; reconstructing as the "cure for piracy".&nbsp; Which, yes, is bullshit marketing, but the idea is to make people think, because I think that if this thing were properly used, it might, no matter who made it.&nbsp; It might even have potential for addressing how to cure poverty, but that may be pushing my luck just to mention.<br /><br />Which I was learning to make in Django 1.3 &lt;edited 2.11.16 to correct information&gt;. And then it was destroyed in front of me by this woman, because I hadn't immediately responded to her comment when I was reading my email.<br /><br />Fortunately, I was able to sell the pieces &lt;of the laptop she smashed&gt; for $20 as scrap to pay our electric bill and get our lights turned back on, so we could cook our stolen chicken breast and make our stolen milk formula for the kids. And of COURSE during all of this mother has gotten and lost by pawning two computers, a brand new top-of-the-line ipad 2, a car, and gold coins given to us to keep for the kids by my parents.<br /><br />At about this time period, she attempted to have an affair, and was sending pictures of herself with our children to the other guy; then she tells me, and I, of course, try to figure out who the fuck this other guy is, and eventually catch her using some black magic stuff I can't talk about (sh!), which mainly involved googling the emails I saw in a shared account and figuring out that it seemed like an OK guy, and I didn't want to be an asshole, and this looked like an exit for me- and so I basically emailed and said "yo, I exist, did you know about this?" and she flipped her shit, dropped him, and we got back together so hard it hurt- something I tend to attribute to borderline personality disorder, but I can't make that diagnosis.<br /><br />But in the middle of this, at about the time she destroys what I genuinely consider to be the beginnings of my life's work, she kicks me out of the house and gets me fired from my job, roughly a day apart. I stay in a hotel room I can afford for the week, if I don't have food. I return the following day, every day, to bring them &lt;stolen&gt; groceries, she won't let the kids near me. It's about this time, I think, that she starts telling my son to call me "Ken" instead of "dad". <br /><br />Because it gets worse and then it stays that bad.<br /><br />Right up until the moment you decide to escape. By then you may be at the bottom of an ocean of fear and doubt, but at least you know which way is up.Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-69909792067383501012015-11-29T13:02:00.001-08:002015-11-29T13:02:52.766-08:00Harajuku moments- or How Tim Ferriss saved my life Twice.This is a piece I wrote for my blog tracking my weight loss.&nbsp; I haven't updated it in over a year, but this part of my biography, I guess, so it kinda fits here. I have put the dates of time periods referenced in {curly braces} to make putting a timeline together more simple.<br /><br />For reference, I have now spent approximately 2 years doing this diet, and will continue it &lt;or something like it&gt; for the rest of my life because it is a very usable "best practice", and without extraneous effort I have lost approximately 56 lbs <i>this year {2015}</i> and am over halfway to a normal size, without making a single sacrifice.&nbsp; I've had every cookie I've wanted in the last two years. I've just gotten smarter about how to want them.<br /><br />Tim Ferriss, if you ever read this, this is a brief synopsis of why you have a permanent standing offer of equity &lt;in the companies that will be formed to do <a href="http://humanitystodolist.blogspot.com/2015/11/a-list-of-projects.html">this</a>&gt;, should you ever be interested.<br /><br />A “Harajuku Moment” is the moment when something changes from being ‘nice to have’ and becomes 'necessary to survive’. {Edit 11/15: a better definition of "harajuku moment" might be "the moment when a decision can no longer be avoided", or "the moment that changes everything"}<br /><br /><div class="copy">For me, with weight specifically, I’ve had two of these.<br /><br /> The first was in Thailand, about 6-8 months ago {2012-13}. &nbsp;I was <a href="http://humanitystodolist.blogspot.com/2015/11/stealing-diapers-and-apologizing.html">living in poverty</a>&nbsp;in Thailand, stealing food to survive, and I had the good fortune to steal a couple of books. &nbsp;You can read more about this in the link I posted, but the gist of it is that I stole a handful of books, including the Song of Ice and Fire series by George Martin (every book except “A Dance With Dragons”), a book called “The Game” by Neil Strauss, and I got the 4 Hour Work Week, by Tim Ferriss.<br /><br /> I knew within 20 minutes of opening the 4HWW that this book would forever change the course of my life.<br /> <br />See, there are two important parts of the 4HWW. &nbsp;The first deals with something called “Fearsetting”, and the second is something called “Dreamlining”. &nbsp;The second is about setting goals you care about; and the first is about dealing with and mitigating all the things that make you give up on those goals.<br /> <br />So the dreamlining was something I was immediately drawn to. &nbsp;My life, at this point, had nothing but fantasy that was appealing about it. &nbsp;I was having panic attacks several times a week, and I was making half-hearted suicide attempts regularly, usually stopping myself in time to survive by reminding myself that my kids would be left uncared for, because their mother- who I was living with, who was crazy, and who hated/hates me and wanted/wants me to die, has HIV- and she’s an HIV denialist who thinks the whole thing is a conspiracy, and so she refuses to be treated for it.<br /> <br />So this was a situation I wanted no part of, but for a variety of reasons- my lack of legal status in the country, lack of financial independence, commitment to the kids- this was a situation I didn’t see a way out of.<br /> <br />When I first started dreamlining, two things happened. &nbsp;First, it took me out of my shitty existence and let me see, clearly, what the real possibilities were and are- much of the book covers practical tools and methods of achieving various goals. Second, it made continuing this existence even more unbearable, because now I could see what was outside it.<br /> <br />The fearsetting exercises were the nails in the coffin. &nbsp;Because of these, I methodically went through and identified the individual specific things I was afraid of and came up with strategies to avoid these and deal with them. &nbsp;I was afraid of my ex trying to hurt or even kill me: I developed strategies to deal with this. &nbsp;I was worried about the kids and keeping them away from her: this was dealt with. &nbsp;I was worried about her trying to sabotage my future efforts: I decided to be as open and honest as possible about what had happened, and it rapidly became clear to people that she was mentally unstable.<br /> <br />So this was the first “Harajuku snowball”. This led me to realize that I&nbsp;<em>did</em> want to lose 100 lbs. &nbsp;I&nbsp;<em>did</em> want to try doing stand-up comedy. I&nbsp;<em>did</em> want to start a tech startup and make millions of dollars on a piece of technology that would make the world a better place. and&nbsp;<em>I did not want to continue this shitty life instead of reaching those goals.</em><br /> <br />And so I reached out to my family. &nbsp;They paid for my kids citizenship- in both countries- and their passports, also in both countries- and then they bought tickets for all of us (but the terrible ex) to come home.<br /> <br />My second Harajuku moment came 2 months later, over Christmas. &nbsp;I was gorging on sweets, guzzling eggnog, and getting drunk on cheap box wine every day. A couple times, I bought a giant bag of butterfinger bars and ate the whole bag in one sitting. When my mother made pies for a couple of friends who came over, I stole almost an entire pie. &nbsp;I was just going nuts, and I was watching my waistline explode.<br /> <br />And then, one day, I’d just had enough. I knew I needed to stop dicking around and get a plan of action or I was never going to escape from this- the situation I’m still in- and I had to admit that I needed to start doing *something*.<br /> <br />So I had just downloaded a lot of ebooks on various topics- I got some things on hypnosis, I got a copy of '50 shades of grey’, and I got a digital copy of 4hww. &nbsp;When I got that last one, I found a new book: the 4-hour body. &nbsp;Same author and everything- so I figured, “Why the fuck not?” and pirated that, too. &nbsp;I kind of played with the idea of the author being some kind of fucking schmexpert who’d had one successful book about one topic and figured he could do a book about anything else and that would by successful too, but I could at least read it for laughs before moving on to something more conventional and proven, like the body-for-life program or keto or whatever.<br /> <br />&nbsp;I should mention that I do have a somewhat extensive history of trying different diets. &nbsp;I did weight watchers as a teenager, and so I have some idea of what it means to control portions into manageable quantities, even without counting calories (at the time, the 'point’ system allotted a certain number of points per day, with points calculated by fat, carbohydrate, fiber, and sodium content, among other things). &nbsp;I did body for life a few years later- in my delusional attempt at becoming a navy SEAL, and under the guidance of one of my father’s good friends, who is a genius-level fitness nut and a high-ranking Jujitsu practitioner and so on- and I made some impressive gains (and losses) with that. &nbsp;I know that it’s possible to lose 10-20 lbs a week, because I did this on weight watchers. &nbsp;I know it’s possible to gain strength very quickly, because- at 320 lbs- I was doing sets of 6 pullups from a starting point of not even being able to hang onto the pullup bar for 10 seconds a year (or less?) earlier. &nbsp;When I first moved to Thailand, I lost approximately 60 lbs in the course of about 2 months, and kept it off for two years with no problem.<br /> <br />So when I opened 4hb and saw the same kinds of things I’d seen in myself, I wasn’t surprised by their claims, but by their compiled presence, and the presence (and claims) of things I hadn’t seen before.<br /> <br />And I knew: here was a way for me to go back to these kinds of results, with a cohesive set of described behaviors that would allow me to do different things to reach them.<br /> <br />And in that moment, I knew I no longer had an excuse to be as fat as I was, and so I began.</div>Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-30663362370033015292015-11-23T14:13:00.000-08:002015-11-23T14:13:34.574-08:00Being the Atheist in a Christian Family<div><span style="font-size: x-small;">The following is a letter I sent to my father, to explain why there was no chance of my kids going to "Vacation Bible School" (A triple oxymoron if ever there was one). This nearly led to a shouting match- but this email managed to clear the air quite well, hence I am reproducing it here, for future reference.</span></div><div></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />To preserve some privacy for the people mentioned, I have changed names to animals.</span></div><div><br />Hi Dad,<br /></div><div>I wrote this out thinking I'd send it to you and mom first, but I figure it's a safer bet to send it to you first, to avoid any conflicts.</div><div><br />So, we had a good talk the other day, but one thing that's very clear is you guys have no idea what I think.&nbsp; I don't want to inflict most of it on anybody, because everybody needs to sleep at night, but I figure I can give you guys the broad strokes in 5 bullet points, with a brief description of <i>how</i> and <i>why</i> I came to these conclusions or reached these decisions, so that you guys can actually address my concerns.&nbsp; </div><ul><li><b>I don't have beliefs, because I've philosophically rejected the validity of 'belief' as a concept.</b>&nbsp; Simply put, belief does not make a thing true, and disbelief does not make a thing false.&nbsp; At best, you believe something true- in which case the belief is spurious. At worst, you believe something false- and so the belief, itself, is the barrier to understanding. So instead of this, I try to have <i>data</i> and <i>knowledge</i> (the 'who', 'what', 'where', 'how much/many', and 'when') and<i><b> </b>understanding</i> (the 'how' and 'why').&nbsp; I don't <u>believe</u> in the 'big bang', or in evolution, or even that I'm sitting at the kitchen table typing this out for you guys. It is enough for me to accept that the evidince is that these things seem to be the case, no matter what I think of them, and that it is my duty- if I care- to know or understand them, rather than to simply tell myself- or anyone else- they are true or false.&nbsp; <br /><br />This has a corollary- I also reject the validity of any faith, which I define as "the assertion of the truth without or in spite of reason or evidence".&nbsp; But "Faith" in the English language has many uses beyond this meaning- most frequently things like "loyalty", "trust", etc- and I don't reject these things, but I try to use these more specific words instead.<br /></li><li><b>I stopped being Christian because it's no longer possible, knowing what I know, to accept that it might be true.</b>&nbsp; There are mountains of evidence and lots of reasons against what you believe. These are the things I've been "strident" about- Biblical contradictions, inaccuracies, forgeries, and apparent lies told for political gain by the factions of the authors, archaeological evidence, Historical records, etc.&nbsp; Going through all of this was a very painful but eye-opening process. So my position could be stated as saying "Whether there is a god or not, it isn't that one".&nbsp; But I don't hate Christianity, in the same way that you don't hate any other religion. I just think it's factually incorrect.&nbsp; I don't hate Christians; you've got good reasons to think and act the way you do, like all of the social factors- for example, being able to still talk to your parents &lt;mom&gt; without them thinking you must be 'evil' or 'spiritually deficient'.&nbsp; But I don't think these reasons contribute meaningfully to the truth of the claims of Christianity.<br /><br />Also important: Nothing bad happened to cause this. I still actively pursue the study of biblical topics - hence mentioning {reading} Josh McDowell's books, and CS Lewis, among others. But I think the best available lesson from any of these is <i>how </i>to think, not <i>what</i> to think. Believing in God gave me an additional coping mechanism for things like Dog's diagnosis- "God doesn't give you what you can't handle" - and was a source of hope in some very dark situations.&nbsp; Nobody's 'misbehavior' caused me to doubt. I have a lot of respect for how you handle your beliefs, and for the rigor that Bear has, and the dedication that Dr. Pigeon in Thailand has, and as much for many other people you don't know about. But none of these have any effect on whether or not the beliefs are true, and in the end, that simply mattered more to me. And so I eventually had to confront the growing case against Christianity that I had been becoming more aware of and knowledgable about for years. By now you should have noticed the result of that, but I'm deliberately cutting out the data here because I know you guys don't want to hear it.<br /><br />Last sub-point about this: I'm not committed to the idea that Christianity is false, but if there is a case to be made for it, this case must also account for the evidence and reasons I've found against it; calling it all a "trick of Satan" simply doesn't cut it. Maybe there are evidence and reasons I don't know about, and if I find them, and they do account for what I've found, I've got nothing against reconverting- but at this point, I'm not holding my breath.<br /></li><li><b>I'm a materialist, in the sense that I think things that don't exist don't exist.</b>&nbsp; Maybe there is something beyond this natural universe; but there hasn't been any convincing evidence I've been able to discover that can't be better understood some other way. But I also think that what we are is not all we can be, and that it's all about how you use the substance of yourself and your environment before you die that allows for the best set of possibilities.&nbsp; Even if we were just computers, computers are still amazing machines that can do awesome things, and the first step towards upgrading is knowing how to upgrade.<br /><br />As a sub-heading, I think the <i>materialistic explanations for religious experience are more sensible than the supernatural explanations</i>. It makes more sense to me that religious experience happens because human brains are amazing but imperfect machines, than to think that there are armies of demons running around putting on skits to dupe people into hell.<br /></li><li><b>I'm an atheist, not a nihilist.</b>&nbsp; I think that everybody has to find or make their own purpose, even Christians. Chipmunk is <i>way</i> more nihilistic than me; hence, he sees no problem with taking the kids to church, since everybody will die anyway.&nbsp; I think what little time we've got here shouldn't be wasted on it, because none of us will get more time here, and the consequences simply don't justify it; At the very least, this means we agree that church is more than just free babysitting.<br /></li><li><b>I'm neither amoral nor immoral.</b> Morality, even yours, is determined by <i>consequences</i>, as these affect <u>happiness</u>, <u>well-being</u>, and <u>free self-determination</u> of <u>conscious entities capable of meaningfully experiencing these things</u>. This is why it's more important to not step on an ant than to not step on a rock; because the ant can actally feel it.&nbsp; All we disagree on is <i>when</i> the consequences occur: you think that the only ones that matter - the 'ultimate' consequences- happen after we die, in Heaven or Hell, and I think that death is the end of that for you, because by definition, there's no 'you' left to experience anything more.<br /><br />This one chafes, by the way. I've raped and murdered all I want. The amount I want is zero. If the only thing stopping you from doing that is fear of hell, you're just not a good person. Christianity doesn't give you 'moral superpowers', and it's insulting when you act like you're somehow the only ones capable of realizing if something is right or wrong. There's no action I've found that a believer could do that an unbeliever couldn't; but religion, yours and everyone else's, can make morally normal people say and do disgisting and wicked things that nobody would otherwise consider. I was circumcised to 'prevent yeast infections' hundreds of years after the invention of soap, because that was the treatment in the tribe you are loyal to- but that's like 'treating' sprained ankles by amputating legs. Being offended by this isn't 'vehemence', and speaking against things like it isn't 'stridence'. I just want us to all be reasonable, and I think these ideas aren't, that you guys (usually) are, and that we can work through this rationally.</li></ul>I hope this isn't too long, and I hope I'm not browbeating you guys.&nbsp; I've intentionally left my evidence out and focused on reasoning instead. I'm sorry for calling your beliefs "a cult" and "mythology".&nbsp; I really don't want to jam anything down your throats. I just feel like I'm surrounded by people trying to do that to me and my kids, because trying to take them to church- when I've repeatedly and explicitly said I'm uncomfortable with it and don't want it to happen- is an example of this. I'm sorry mom is getting pity for it, but that looks like bullying to me, and that's <u>another</u> reason to not let the kids go to this church.&nbsp; <br /><br />An equivalent that might help you understand would be if you were visiting a Muslim's house and they had you kneel on the floor to pray before dinner; it's not your faith, it's theirs, and you can respect them and kneel, but they shouldn't take that to mean they can drag you to the mosque afterwards, or that they'll be doing you a favor by taking your kids there when you've told them you're not comfortable with it. I think I remember Mom turning down similar 'invitations' when I was Vince's age, for the same reasons.<br /><br />Last, I want to reiterate that I love you guys. I don't think you're deficient parents in any way, I just disagree with you about your religion, and that's <i>it</i>.Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-15026959092643018012015-11-20T23:12:00.001-08:002015-11-20T23:40:54.660-08:00Coffee with WarlordsIt begins, as any story might, with me absent-mindedly doodling a submachine gun in the margins of a notebook, after my weekly English tutorials with my tribal refugee neighbors in Thailand, only to hear from over my shoulder a rather delighted-sounding "Oh! My cousin's army could use such a gun! Can you make it for them?"<br /><br />Now, for those of you just joining this story, a bit more needs to be done to properly set the scene. This is late 2006 or possibly early 2007, and I'm living and working as a missionary with this sort of tribal minority in Thailand, as well as with orphans and kids who couldn't be raised by their family- of those, approximately half were in the orphan/hostels because they had family members with HIV, and virtually all were tribal minorities who were in Thailand in the first place because they &lt;or their parents&gt; had either been involved in drug smuggling from Burma to Thailand, were refugees from ethnic cleansing that was happening there, or both.<br /><br />Being a missionary, I saw my work as God's work, and was devoted to bringing peace and prosperity and Jesus Christ to these people- virtually all of whom were already Christian enough to be uninterested in being converted again. But I was clever, and figured I could at least materially assist the "peace and prosperity" stuff, since that's all physically possible and mostly just a matter of getting things done.<br /><br />But it was around this time that I was formulating my early ideas of both what is possible and what is beneficial in terms of raising the standards of living for subsistence hunters and farmers, living under occupation and with the direct threat of violence on a day to day basis.<br /><br />Much of this is still not widely known. What you can probably find out, via sources like Google and Wikipedia, is that Burma had been a British colony which was basically shoved out of the Empire after world war 2 and nearly a decade of war and occupation by the Japanese, whereupon it promptly collapsed and entered what is still the longest civil war in history- as I sit here writing this, I'm fairly certain that whether it has been declared finished or not, there are still nationalist movements among the tribal groups I worked with, and I very much doubt that they know or care that the Burmese soldiers technically no longer have legal orders to shoot them on sight- and I'd be very surprised if the Burmese soldiers know or care either, being that the majority of them were tribal children who were forced conscripts into the same battalions that killed their families. {Edit for clarity: the "most Burmese soldiers started out as child conscripts" statement refers specifically to how the Burmese army operated in the tribal lands it was trying to re-capture, and does not describe the Burmese army in general}<br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">Footnote: If you want to get a good picture of the sort of news clipping I saw on a day-to-day basis, there is a missionary group called <a href="http://www.freeburmarangers.org/">Free Burma Rangers</a> which trains paramedics in the tribal groups on the Thai border with Burma to deliver basic medical treatment to all of the villages they can reach. </span><br /><br />The Burman ethnic group has a long and bloody history as a military power, and this is particularly the view of the Thai people, who have seen their borders shift over the centuries as the Thai and Burmans squabble over the same land and towns, with the Burmese occupying much of what is now northern Thailand for nearly 300 years, including Chiang Mai- the city I lived in. And the end of occupation saw the revival of these traditions, with the aid of modern weapons.<br /><br />So it should make perfect sense when I tell you that, as a policy of self defense, and with the aid of the US weapons that the Thai government was receiving as part of their compensation for the anti-communist collaboration with the American military during the Vietnam war, the Thai government began arming all of the tribal groups along the Burmese side of its' border as a way of denying the ability to operate freely, and ths threaten the Thai border, to the various centralized Burman governments that rose and fell from the same ashes.<br /><br />Now that the stage is somewhat set, what happened to his cousin's army?<br /><br />Well, as it turned out, it wasn't much of an army- at various times, numbers ranging from 50-300 were thrown out as estimates of the number of their soldiers.&nbsp; The conversation was mostly bullshit- I was in no position to be offering material assistance to any military effort, and had nothing to tell them that was useful.&nbsp; After that English lesson, me and this person- I'll call him "Andrew", because he had such an "English name" that he had given himself, although it wasn't this one- retired to his house for tea, Jesus music (he sang, and I listened), and a discussion of what materials, machines, and processes were needed to make guns if we were, hypothetically, up in the mountainous regions on the northern border of Myanmar, near China, where the Lisu people have lived for centuries.<br /><br />It turned out to be an interesting problem, and one that I have spent years thinking about.&nbsp; There is an abundance of raw materials- even scrap metal, often from things such as downed WW2 aircraft that have never been located or salvaged. But there are no tools, or the tools that exist are of poor quality, or are very rudimentary and largely unsuitable for the tasks that firearms manufacture would demand of them.<br /><br />Some time after this, Andrew told me that he wanted me to meet "his friend" for coffee, because his friend was somebody important in the efforts to resist the crimes against humanity being committed by the Burmese military.<br /><br />We took a Songthaew- a sort of modified pickup truck that serves as one form of public transport in much of Thailand- to a fancy hotel downtown, mostly so that we wouldn't get wet from the beginnings of the Songkhran festival that marks the start of the new year on the Thai calendar. We arrived a bit late and wandered in, two extremely out-of-place and mismatched characters, into a dark empty cold banquet hall with a few sleepy diners having breakfast in various corners of the room.&nbsp; <br /><br />The man we met was short, a bit stocky, beginning to bald, and dressed conservatively. We shook hands, and he announced that he wanted to begin with a prayer- and I think I might have prayed too, at his request, but I am not sure about this detail. It was clear that his faith was important to him, and that he wanted mine to be to me.<br /><br />And then he introduced himself as a general in the Kachin Independence Army.<br /><br />I can't say I remember the bulk of what was said very vividly- a lot of it was social niceties, especially to start, when he was trying to get a sense of who I was, and so on.<br /><br />So I chattered away about "how X is made" and "if we could get y to your area, you could do guns AND z"- I think I was trying to sell him on the idea of industrializing these villages, which I'm fairly sure he wasn't interested in, and I'm more sure I wasn't coherently articulating.<br /><br />But I do remember very clearly what the problem stopping the gun discussion was: there was no shortage of guns, but only of bullets, and the means to reload these.&nbsp; I listened as he described how his soldiers would save spent ammunition casings- the {usually} brass tube-looking things that get spit out the side of the gun when the bullet (the actual projectile) is fired out the front. In his case, these were usually steel casings- nigh on impossible to reuse- and to compound the matter, the only available way to reload them was with homemade gunpowder, which caused the weapons to foul rapidly, leading to jamming.&nbsp; I briefly described to him some of the ways we could go about making better powder, such as nitrocelulose-based smokeless powders- but I didn't know enough chemistry to describe how to get the ingredients necessary to make this.<br /><br />The last detail I remember very clearly is describing the sort of minimum budget that might be needed to get basic production up and running- I cited the low thousands of dollars, describing the pricing I had seen on machine tools such as lathes and mills.<br /><br />And this is where the conversation, for me, became unsettling, because money was no object- and my grasp of economics, at the time recently bolstered by my first 'reading' of the &lt;excellent&gt; book "Freakonomics", led me to rapidly conclude that there was no legitimate way that this guy had that kind of money that wasn't fucking somebody up somewhere, and that was something I was unwilling to play ball with.&nbsp; <br /><br />I am making an effort not to describe things more vividly than I actually remember them, but I remember probing at this gently in our conversation- or as gently as I could, given my very limited social skills, especially at that time- and the responses he gave were also unsettling. This was a man who seemed familiar with giving life and death orders without accountability, and who used his god's authority to do so.<br /><br />Our business concluded, we exchanged social niceties- overall, it was a very pleasant conversation, although the coffee was terrible- and he gave me his phone number, telling me to call him if I needed absolutely anything.&nbsp; I promptly added his number to my phone- and never called him.Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-45804521261170473742015-11-20T03:35:00.000-08:002015-11-20T03:35:53.646-08:00 A Very Long Atheist Testimony<h1 class="title entry-title" itemprop="name"></h1><h1 class="title entry-title" itemprop="name"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: large;">Foreword <span style="font-size: x-small;">19/11/15</span>:</span></span></span></h1><h1 class="title entry-title" itemprop="name"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">I wrote this post several years ago for a <a href="http://godromp.blogspot.com/">blog</a> that I never really did anything with. It seems to be a good basis for describing my atheism, as it began at the time and as it largely still is. Hopefully it will be clear why I wrote this: you don't become a missionary on accident, and religion was a big part of my day-to-day life. And still is, in many ways, since there is no escaping from it- but I consider myself fortunate enough to not have fallen for it anymore. And I feel like an asshole for how condescending that sounds, but not quite enough like an asshole to not say it.</span></span></h1><h1 class="title entry-title" itemprop="name"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">&nbsp;The things I list as examples of Biblical contradictions, errors, inaccuracies, and forgeries are the subject of a book I'd like to write someday and I am collecting notes about them. If you'd like to see examples of these things, the study tool I used primarily and still consider to be best is "<a href="http://www.bibleworks.com/">BibleWorks</a>", a software package that contains the canonical transcripts (lol, srsly) of the available fragments that the 'official' bibles in existence today are translated from.&nbsp; IIRC all of these documents, and many more apocryphal ones, are held by the Vatican, but BibleWorks is as good as you can get to going and seeing them without leaving the house.</span></span></h1><h1 class="title entry-title" itemprop="name"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Failing this, check out the marvelous <a href="http://www.bibviz.com/">BibViz</a> web app. It's truly a masterpiece, and I hope to see a Quran, Hadith, Bagavad Gita, and even a Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and Hamlet version.</span></span></h1><h1 class="title entry-title" itemprop="name"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">If enough people pester me, I'll go through and fix things. I don't think it's my best writing, but it seems coherent enough for now. </span></span></span></span></span></h1><h1 class="title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>IN THE BEGINNING</b></span> </span>&nbsp;</span> </span></span></h1><h1 class="title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">&nbsp;<span>Before I begin, I should clarify the terminology used below.</span></span></span></h1><div class="article-content entry-content" itemprop="articleBody"><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span> </span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: small;">A</span> "Testimony", in the language of particularly evangelical Christians, is the story of how you 'came to Christ', usually with a list of reasons and anecdotal evidence of why it was the right thing to do, or how it was inevitable.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">This is my testimony as a gnostic atheist- at least in regards to Christianity (among others, but Christianity is the relevant one for now)- and this is the other term that people trip over. A 'gnostic' atheist is someone who knows there is no god, which can be compared with an 'agnostic' atheist who simply doesn't believe in any god. One knows it's fake, the other does not believe. To again clarify my position: I know that the Christian god is fake (gnostic atheism) but do not have the relevant knowledge to make these kinds of claims about, say, traditional Chinese religion, however, I do not believe there are Chinese gods (agnostic atheism).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">I was born into a Christian home and had an interesting upbringing. My earliest memories that are in any way relevant to the discussion of religion are of dinosaurs, and it was a knowledge of the time scales involved (millions of years, not thousands) that made me able to pick up on some details in religion that didn’t make sense early on.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The next relevant memories, however, are of my own attempt at conversion to Christianity as a child of perhaps 3 years old.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The teacher asked if any of the kids in Sunday school wanted to “Ask Jesus into their hearts”, and I raised my hand, thinking it was what was expected of me.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">I, and one other child, were taken into a separate room, where we were read` John 3:16, and both of us- quite awkwardly, as I remember it- asked Jesus into our hearts, and from that point on, I called myself a Christian. In relatively short order, I had read through a children’s bible, and subsequently (but a few years later) a comic book version which was more in-depth.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Both were informative, and the second especially has stayed in my mind.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">My subsequent studies of the bible lacked academic rigor, but despite this, I did manage to read much of it at random, and to also read through it entirely several times in various translations, notably KJV and NIV (76 Translation), and also used the Amplified Bible- before having any linguistic knowledge at all- in order to facilitate greater understanding sometimes.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">By the time I was perhaps 14, however, I had wandered away from the faith.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Perhaps it was a lack of Christian friends, perhaps it was the idiotic insistence on believing things that I knew couldn’t be true- such as biblical creation- and perhaps it was some of the bigotry and bizarre fundamentalism I saw in the churches I attended with my family.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">I was well-versed enough to know better than to ascribe these attributes to God, but in any event, despite feeling guilty about it, I left the faith and began mucking about with what I thought of as Wicca, but which was actually just a mess of different things I downloaded online.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Why Wicca? Because the wiccans I met were nice, genuine people, who weren’t just in on it for the benefit of their parents social standing, and they weren’t concerned with souls- and their attitude towards drugs was one of experimental interest rather than shame-faced aversion, an attitude that, while I found fascinating, did nothing to facilitate me getting high as a teenager.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">And so that is how I remained for a period of about 2 years, before being introduced to George Carlin, and becoming an atheist- for the first time.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">I can remember the occasion well, I had downloaded a small clip of a standup routine, either to my own laptop or to my grandfather’s computer, and the clip was the now-famous “bullshit” segment.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">For those of you unfortunate enough to have not heard the quote, here it is:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: #e3d194; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: #eeeeee;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: #eeeeee;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: #eeeeee;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">&nbsp;</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: #eeeeee;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit!</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">This byte resonated with me, and I had to admit- </span><i style="font-size: 12pt;">had</i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> to admit- that no matter what, religion was ridiculous and improbable.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The emotional gut-reaction of realizing I was praying to what was, essentially, just an invisible guy in the sky.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Then Thailand happened (long story short- I got drunk, woke up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning, my dad saw this as a cry for help, gave me the choice of going to Thailand to teach English or Mexico to study art.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">I chose Thailand).</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">After a few weeks of being here, spending all my time with missionaries, who themselves spent all of their time studying the bible and planning ways to spread the gospel to remote corners of the world.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">At a getaway, a camp lasting several days up in the villages on the border between Thailand and the Karren state in Burma, I was convinced that what I was seeing was divine purpose.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Recapturing the essence of that moment, even after so few years, is difficult, but I genuinely thought that there was something to the work these people were doing and attempting to do, and that this was an admirable thing that was made possible only by their faith.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">And so I began studying the bible in earnest, seeking, for the first time, to both have faith and to know exactly what that faith was.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">I was introduced, at this time, to a program I still use to study the bible, called “Bibleworks”, which enabled me to not only compare translations, but to examine the original words in those translations and the way they had been translated in other places.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">For the first time, even considering my use of the amplified bible before this, I was able to see theological disputes with science laid bare, from a biblical perspective; the biblical story of creation in Genesis, for instance, makes no claim that god made the world in seven days; the actual word in Hebrew, “Yohm”, is translated in various places as ‘hour’, ‘day’, ‘month’, ‘season’, ‘year’, ‘period of years’, and notably in exodus, it is this word that refers to the 40 years in the desert (story of Moses leading Israelites out of Egypt).</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">And so, with this knowledge and a very good impression of the character and demeanor of Jesus (I remember being particularly impressed with the verse of Matthew 15:14, and still consider it a valuable lesson), I resolved to attempt to believe on the basis that, if it was true, I would have the benefit of meeting at least one literary figure with whom I was enamored, and if it was not, it should still convince me to live a good life and at the end of it, I would never know the difference.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">And so my faith remained for a time, growing slowly as I came to accept more things rather than critically question or reject them- a fact I was uneasy with, but accepted as a natural part of ‘spiritual growth’.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">My previous dint in atheism left a mark, and I tended to refer to God as “My invisible friend”, and I learned interesting things about church history, the interpretation of the scriptures and biblical doctrine.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">I truly believed- I must emphasize this, because the attitude among nearly all Christians is that, if you become apostate, it means something was wrong with you and you never were truly saved, but this is a false statement, because I truly believed, and knew I was saved, and was secure in that knowledge.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">It is difficult for me to pin down where I stopped believing, because it happened slowly over a very long period of time. One of the things I found more and more unbearable was the idea that some people were created with the odds so incredibly stacked against them. If the objective (for God) was to make as many people go to heaven as possible, then this seemed wasteful; and so I became slowly convinced that portions of the bible were immoral, whether or not they were right or wrong. Despite this, I found comfort in the belief (I don’t think it is biblical, although it may be) that, first, God would not give anyone anything that they truly could not bear, and second, that all people had equally valid struggles which would consume the whole of their lives, and it was the overcoming of the barriers in one’s own life that was the necessary ingredient of success.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Then I began to read critical scientific books. The first of these, and perhaps the most important for this discussion, was “The Grand Design”, by Hawking and Mladanov. These books walked me through the physics of the creation of the universe, of dimensions so small that they would be smaller than themselves if measured, and of the beautiful and complex universe we live in, and how it may even be giving rise to entirely new universes. It was listening to this book via my MP3 player that led me to seek out more scientific books, because I felt my eyes opening. I do not remember clearly how I came upon the next books inevitably mentioned, but in fairly short order I had discovered that I had downloaded both “The God Delusion” as an audiobook, and “God is Not Great”, in one folder, perhaps in a moment of religious belligerence. I had already begun questioning my ideas of God a bit more as a result of The Grand Design, and I had to shrug them off- I simply didn’t know enough to reach any meaningful conclusions, and I was still secure in my beliefs (notably, God provides purpose, God takes care of people, God does not test anyone in a way they cannot bear, and what I considered the ace up my sleeve, that God was the basis for morality, and that this was the design he referred to in Genesis when he said “in his image”).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">And so, with this paltry handful of arrows in my quiver, I ventured into the books by Dr. Dawkins and Mr. Hitchens. I was not sincerely moved by them at first, to be honest, and while I admired Dawkins’s honesty and the scientific exactness of his arguments, I was less impressed by the arguments made by Mr. Hitchens. Both, however, provided suitable starting points for the unavoidable conflict between Science and Christianity (and indeed, all religion), and so I set out from that point, determined to find the truth, confident that God was watching, secretly proud, and also that he was keeping score.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">My faith did not last my next bible study.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">I began looking at, for example, the story of Noah’s Ark, and found it unbelievable.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">I compared the order of creation in Genesis to what is known about the evolution of life on earth, and was forced to conclude that at least two of the three accounts (for there are two in Genesis) must be incorrect, and that even if evolution via natural selection was incorrect, both discrepant accounts in Genesis could not be correct.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">For several hours, I pored over different sections of the Bible, alternately Googling things I thought might be relevant.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">By the end of it, I was disappointed with Jesus, thought that David (of David and Goliath fame) was an unabashedly ambitious bisexual warlord with a Machiavellian bent, I disbelieved all accounts of Moses, and I could not stand to look at the actions of Israel when it was acting under the orders of God.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">It has been several months since then, and I still read the bible regularly, and even take the odd lesson from it- but the more I read, the less I am able to believe.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">My beliefs, first in actual doctrine and second in the purpose, morality, and overall goodness of god, have been damaged by the bible to the point where they will very likely never again be taken seriously.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">My morality, however, and my belief in the goodness of my fellow human beings, and my determination to make- rather than find, or be given- a purpose for myself has given my life new meaning.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">I have seen it suggested, in many places, that atheism is spiritual death, or that it is suicide of the soul, and I can’t take that idea seriously anymore.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">If I were not an atheist, I would not have realized that I have had a perfectly good soul my entire life- it's made of neurons.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>THE END</b></span> </span></div></div>Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-88296224060829433932015-11-18T15:50:00.004-08:002015-11-19T10:32:56.898-08:00Stealing diapers and apologizing profuselyThis will be an interesting post. I'm going to adapt a Reddit AMA I did about a year and a half ago so that all of the questions and my responses are in order, and pared down to strictly relevant things.&nbsp; If you're interested, the original can be found <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1vs8pt/i_am_an_american_citizen_that_lived_in_poverty/">here</a>.<br /><br />I want to leave this up as a reference, but I may take it down if people start being able to identify the other person I'm talking about- I may have regrets and resent the way I was treated, but I'm not a fucking asshole.&nbsp; Don't look for her, don't look for revenge, don't be a fucking asshole. <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">Intro</span></div><br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">I've recently escaped from this situation and am still coming to grasps with it. Here's the basic rundown:<br /><br />Eight years ago, my family sent me to Thailand for a short term mission trip. Two years after this, I came home for a month and met a Thai girl online: when I went back, we hooked up and kind of hit it off.<br /><br />To cut a long story short, she had baggage: so we got STD tests together and both came out clean. Then, after much drama, she got pregnant with the first of our two children, and prenatal screening confirmed that she was HIV positive. I got tested again (and multiple times since then) and have never had any kind of positive test result. The same is true for both of our kids.<br /><br />The other important detail is that we started a business together, and through a combination of accumulating poverty, mental instability, and outside interference, we lost everything, and so the second half of the relationship was plagued by continuous poverty, where we became deeper and deeper in debt (mostly to suppliers for our business) and then things came apart. I was unable to obtain a visa because of the lack of money: all of us were unable to afford basic medical care in one of the cheapest places in the world to get this. <br /><br />Beginning two years ago, we had so little money that I began stealing food from supermarkets to make sure we'd have enough to eat. I became quite good at this, and eventually worked my way up from stealing candybars to stealing diapers, and baby formula- large bulky high-risk items- as well as staple foods, such as bags of rice.<br /><br />I was never caught. I also made an effort to not steal things that would hurt people- I never stole from small mom-and-pop stores, only from large well-established retail chains that could withstand the losses.<br /><br />Approximately 10 months ago {Edit 11/15: this refers to approximately March 2013}, I caught my fiance (as I thought of her) attempting to have an affair. This, combined with the intermittent physical abuse she targeted me with (I wouldn't hit her: she was basically able to get away with anything, to the point of beating me with sticks, destroying all my possessions, etc), was just too much to bear- and after a month or two of denial, I began taking steps to get myself and my kids out of the country. <br /><br />&nbsp;I can't make a diagnosis, but I very strongly suspect that the woman I had been living with has borderline personality disorder- a condition where emotions are experienced so intensely that they distort rational perception of the world- and that this condition was present for the entire time that we were together, and that it was exacerbated by our on-going situation.<br /><br />So, I think that's the big picture. AMA.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">Questions and Responses</span> </div><br /><b></b><b>How'd you manage to get back to the US with your kids?</b> <br /><br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">My family here bought tickets and paid for the paperwork to be done (getting kids citizenship and passports, paying my visa fine, that kind of thing).<br /><br /><i>EDIT</i><br /><br />I should add that most American consulates and embassies around the world offer a 'repatriation' service, where they'll get you out of whatever country you are stranded in, to a major US city (Boston on the east coast, LA on the west, iirc), but this isn't free- you have to pay them back later- and I was less sure about being able to get my kids out with this as well, because even though they technically qualified for citizenship, we'd never applied for it for them, because we never had the extra money, and so family was the first choice- and I'm <i>incredibly</i> grateful for their support.<br /><br /><br /><b>Did you and your kids leave without your wife knowing?</b></div><div class="md"><br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">No, we had to get her consent on some of the documents in order for them to be able to travel with just me (as opposed to travelling with both me and my wife/fiance/whatever). So she was on board, on the basis that we would return to Thailand after just under a year.<br /><br />After arriving here, she began accusing me of kidnapping the kids- where my whole idea from the beginning had been joint custody (<i>edit: I have documents that can also show this is the case, signed by her and legally notarized. Kidnapping was never an option, joint custody was</i>)- and when I responded to this, she began sending death threats for me and my family here in the US, saying things like "I will hunt you down" and "If I can't win, nobody can win!". She'd made death threats in person in the past, but this was a first for having it in writing, and so I promptly reported this to the US Consulate where she was apparently applying for a visa.<br /><br />There was a brief period following this where we were in contact, but I ended that contact and told her to leave us all alone. She was contacting anybody she could find to try and get them to tell her where we were (which she knew already)- including work associates for my father's business and a somewhat famous family friend.</div></div><b></b><br /></div><div class="md"><b>&nbsp;How did your family feel about you moving to Thailand at the time? &nbsp;</b></div><div class="md"></div><div class="md"><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">Well they originally sent me there as a kind of 'learning punishment' for being an unruly teenager. I'd gotten drunk underage- the first time I'd ever been drunk- and I woke up in a hospital, still wasted, and so my family basically gave me a few options, one of which was going to Thailand short term to teach English and so on.<br /><br />So I went over there the first time (late 2005) to do that and just loved it. The cost of life is so low that it seems ridiculous, I rented a small apartment for about 40 bucks (USD) per month, I spent my time learning languages and teaching English, and at night I'd meet up with international friends for drinks. It was genuinely the best time of my life, at least thus far.<br /><br />and after two years of this, I came home and had a vacation, saw my friends and family, and then went back to continue it, only to find myself in a pretty bad relationship that always seemed like it was just about to get enough better to make it all worthwhile- and it never did.<br /><br />So I'm bitter about some of this, I think. But I'm not resentful about going to Thailand, and it was such an obvious improvement over the massive time-wasting I was doing in the US at the time that everybody recognized it as a good thing. All else aside, I speak Thai fluently now, I can get around in Laotian and Cambodian Khmer, I can perform basic social niceties in a half dozen tribal languages from the region- including Hmong, which is actually a substantial minority asian group in the US- and I can understand conversational dutch and german. I learned web development and programming while I was over there. I made real, measurable positive impacts in the lives of some of the people I knew there.<br /><br />it's just that being there was one of the things that made this terrible situation possible. It wasn't just that I was there, in the same way that it wasn't just that I had to be human- these are anthropic, necessary to the condition. But it was kind of a perfect storm that happened while I was there, that could have ultimately happened anywhere.<br /><br /><b>I've only been to Thailand once, but it's the LAST place I'd send my unruly kid to.</b> <br /><br />well, their intention of getting me to function was successful, until the bad relationship thing- and bad relationships can happen anywhere.<br /><br /><b>That's like saying "traffic accidents can happen anywhere", and then proceeding to cross a 10-lane highway blindfolded.</b><br /><br /><b> </b><b>For a western guy, Thailand carries 10x the risk of a bad relationship compared to most of the West... for one, it's impossible to read Thai people without having stayed there for many years, and women interested in Farang, although plentiful, are on average not the cream of the crop either -- most are scarred by past relationship issues with Thai guys (and some are their own fault, despite what they say!), or just can't get a decent Thai guy interested. Not all, of course.</b><br /><br />My relationship, while bad, wasn't bad in the typical ways that you hear about there.<b> </b><br /><ul><li>She was well educated. She spoke multiple languages in business environments, she attended one of the best colleges in Thailand and was on her last semester of one of the more difficult degrees, with a very good GPA.</li></ul><ul><li>She was generally self-sufficient. I was not a 'cash cow' that she brought home to the countryside: her parents are divorced, and she's not on the best of terms with them for reasons I won't get into, but the consensus from both of us was "they might deserve some sin sod in 10 years, after we've got our shit together and they've been sufficiently chastised for their actions".</li></ul><ul><li>She was from the city, not the countryside, and so this made her behavior different, as well as her standards for everybody else's behavior. Very atypical for the 'easy going' Thai people.<br /><br /></li><li>She wasn't promiscuous- at least when we were together, she simply didn't have the chance. I didn't either, despite constant accusations by her. She wasn't ever a 'bar girl' of any variety, and generally found it difficult to have conversations with them- she considered them idiots and was very impatient with them. I don't think she was wrong about them being idiots, honestly.<br /><br /></li><li>Both of us spoke each other's languages going in. I apparently had an easy time learning Thai- most people complain endlessly about it, but I didn't find it terribly difficult or time-consuming, I just looked up or asked about what I wanted to be able to express and then practiced that and apparently got pretty good. She did the same thing, much more intensely, as a child- a kind of rebellion against her teachers saying what a bad student she was because her parents were divorced- and learned English, to an impressive degree, over the course of a summer. Not perfect, but about 95% of the way there, as opposed to maybe 70-80% of the way there for most Thai people in Thailand who speak 'fluen' English.</li></ul><b>&nbsp;</b>&nbsp; <br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md"><b>Being on poor terms with family (especially the mother) is a <i>massive</i> red flag for a Thai (much more so than an American). Duty towards parents is so central to Thai society and culture, that no matter how big the parent's flaws might be, children are not allowed to break it off. Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and it's impossible to know that starting out in a new culture (I know folks who naively take it as "good, no need to worry about the parents", when it's actually a strong indicator other relationships will shatter in a worse way).</b><br /><br /><b>However, it's odd since she's so well-educated/self-sufficient and you were not the cash cow, that she did not manage to contribute some income to the family. Enough rice for the family of 4 is well within means of most Thais, even without much education or skills... and women are often the breadwinners here (e.g. all the street vendors). </b></div></div><br /></div></div><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">Well, we started a business together, and for a while we were pretty successful at it, but the biggest detriment to our cash was her trying to buy things we couldn't afford. She spent 50,000 baht at a time getting laptops, which she'd have to pawn in order to make payments on, and then she'd lose it at the pawn shop after not making enough to buy it back (pawning, by default, implies a secured loan less than the value of a commodity used to secure the loan), but she'd pay interest to the pawn shop so they'd hold it for her for the next month- and on and on, stuff like this happened over and over. Notable purchases included a second-hand car with a first-hand price (she didn't haggle, I was kicked out of the house at the time and she came and picked me up from the friends house I was crashing at in her new old car), a brand new iPad 2 when they came out, and a macbook pro. besides other computers, a motorbike, etc.<br /><br />I should also note that, while what you said about 'family obligations' isn't wrong, this isn't the complete picture- things in the big cities are substantially different from the countryside, and this is one of those things. It's not so much a failing of tradition as it is pragmatism for how different life in the city generally is, with a sprinkling of daily foreign cultural influence thrown in. Above and beyond this, the Ex's family was atypical in not being strictly Thai, but rather 2nd or 3rd generation Thai citizens on one half of the family and native thais on the other. I think you'd be surprised by the mix as well, it's one of the less common ones. But anyway, this did change some things as well.</div></div></div><div class="md"><b>The impulse purchases you're describing sound a lot like the mania of bipolar disorder. I don't think she has borderline personality disorder. I am extremely familiar with both of these mental illnesses, although not with your wife, obviously. Bipolar disorder misdiagnosed as something else can be a nightmare.</b><br /><br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">There are more behavior patterns that I haven't really given a lot of time to- they're one of the hundreds of detail that made this story what it is, but which don't all need to be recounted to help you have an understanding of it.<br /><br />Don't get me wrong, I'm not writing you off, you may be right- I spent a long time seriously considering the possibility that she was manic depressive. I seriously asked whether I was a sociopath for not feeling the emotions she was feeling. But I came to the hypothesis of borderline because of a few critical elements.<br /><ul><li>Her consistent inability to accurately frame emotions in a relative scale. A minor embarrassment in front of one of my friends early on, for instance, caused feelings of intense shame and betrayal, rather than a moment's embarrassment- and this was to the point that I had to alienate this friend to a large degree (make contact on a yearly basis rather than a daily basis) in order to keep her happy.<br /><br /></li><li>Her consistent inability to see where she might have gotten something wrong. Small arguments where she'd misunderstand something were things she'd bring up every time we had a fight, on the basis that I was such a dick and she had understood everything correctly and fuck me.<br /><br /></li><li>A lot of her behavior managed to keep me successfully in orbit and never abandoning her. A lot of her paranoia involved unreasonable things, like "people will kidnap our kids because they have white skin" and so we were a bit cloistered, with her having longer stretches with jobs (I didn't interfere; she always inevitably quit after a few months; I was stuck watching the kids during these times, sometimes literally locked in and unable to leave). So this looks more like the abandonment prevention than mania to me.<br /><br /></li><li>not much seemed taboo when she wanted to win an argument (more control, less abandonment). The time (mentioned earlier) where I thought she had given me a concussion, she was hitting me in the head while I was holding our 2- or 3-month-old second child, and she was accusing me of loving one and hating the other and so on. During another argument of a similar nature, she grabbed this child- who was maybe 8 months old at this point- by the hair, and began to shake them violently, and the only time that I ever laid a hand on her was then- I grabbed her and pushed her across the room onto the bed. (I was very glad this had happened to her: but I was very upset that it had to be at my hands.)<br /><br /></li><li>She had abandonment issues during her childhood that are typical- but not diagnostic- of people with BPD. part of the reason sin sod ('bride tax', discussed elsewhere) wasn't an issue with her family is that she has vivid memories of her parents arguing over which of them had to take her, because both wanted her brother.</li></ul></div></div><br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md"><b>AHHHH, what you've described above. Let me break it down for you.</b><br /><b> </b><br /><ul><li><b>SHE'S THAI. You made her lose face in front of your friend. That is a HUGE no-no.</b><br /><br /></li><li><b>SHE'S THAI. You shouldn't tell her she's wrong about anything. Do you know about greng jai? Also, see the losing face thing above. I know very few traditional Thais who can admit when they are wrong. It's embarrassing. And a traditional Thai wouldn't tell someone that they are wrong (even if they are).</b><br /><br /></li><li><b>SHE'S THAI. Most traditional Thai women I know stick to their men LIKE GLUE because they are so afraid they will cheat. Are the women paranoid? Not really - men do cheat here, and they do it often. Other women don't care that a man has a girlfriend and/or wife already. They. Do. Not. Care. It's insane. How do I know this? I've been living in Thailand more than four years. I've lived in both Chiang Mai and Bangkok. I will say that BKK has much more modern and western-style relationships. But the insane crazy jealousy is still an issue here.</b><br /><br /></li><li><b>Not sure about this one, it could be a sign of being nuts. Or it could be a sign of trying to control you. I've never dated a Thai woman, being a woman myself, but I've heard EVERYONE (including Thai women themselves!) say "all Thai women are crazy." So there's that.</b><br /><br /></li><li><b>Uhhh... if I heard my parents say things like that, I'd have abandonment issues too. Don't think you can count that as evidence of Borderline.</b></li></ul><b> </b><b>Anyway. My diagnosis: she's a Thai female. One of the more crazy ones, perhaps, but still. Thai female.</b><br /><br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">Look, thanks, but I <i>did</i> live there for 8 years, and I <i>did</i> speak the language- more fluently than perhaps 90-95% of expatriates there. she was far from the only person I knew there, and far from the first.<br /><br />What you're saying isn't blatantly wrong. But you're attributing too much to culture- especially a culture that she somewhat rejected and operated in as an outsider, in many ways- and <i>even if everything you say were right</i> this would still not excuse her actions.<br /><br />So, look, I really appreciate the input here, but this is something that I made a very serious effort to discover the nature of, and you seem to be writing off the examples of the kinds of behavior I gave as if they're simply cultural misunderstandings. Did that play some role? Certainly. Often. Without question.<br /><br />But in this case, culture failed to provide sufficient explanation for the behavior. And it's more pressing, because, again, this was a culture that this person (rightly, I think) saw as overly dogmatic and less capable of allowing personal accomplishment or innovation and so on. I can't speak for her, but I can say that other people didn't have, eg, the problem I had- where she took statements out of context and never acknowledged correction- and this selective blindness, especially in a way that allows some kind of control of the relationship, is the kind of thing people with BPD leverage.<br /><br /><b>What religion was the basis for the mission trip?</b> </div></div><br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">Christian. (<i>edit for clarification: I was an agnostic atheist when I went, my family was unaware of my lack of faith, and I didn't see it as a barrier to going somewhere exotic and doing good</i>) I converted to Christianity shortly after moving to Thailand in '05 because of something I call "Losing Pascal's Wager", I studied the Bible in a theological seminary there- with genuine experts, who I still admire- but became atheist again when it became apparent that whether I liked it or not, the Bible didn't answer important questions, answered them incorrectly, and contradicted itself; and so my last 'quest' as a Christian was to set out and find these bits for myself, to answer them, or at least know what they were, because ignorance would be inexcusable.<br /><br />So I'm a gnostic atheist now, basically, and I know pretty authoritatively that whether there is a god or not, it isn't the one in the Christian Bible.</div></div><br /><b>WHY didn't you teach English at some crappy illegal place for 400/hour? That could have given you enough baht for food.&nbsp;</b><br /><br />This is one of the things I did, actually. Other things include outbound telesales, starting a startup (one of the things I'm doing now is re-building this, because I think the idea still has merit), acting as a tour guide and tour booking agent, and other things of this nature. I was even a TEFL course instructor.<b>&nbsp;&nbsp; </b>{edit 11/15: don't forget that we were also running our own business together during all of this, which provided enough to keep a roof over our heads, usually}<br /><br /><b>What's the best item you stolen?</b><br /><br />I stole a couple of the Song of Fire and Ice books to read. I was very depressed and needed SOME kind of escape, and this is what I got. I eventually sold these- the only items I made money on.<br /><br />{edit 11/15: I also stole Tim Ferriss's <i>Four Hour Work Week</i>, which I credit with giving me the mental tools I needed to address and escape from the situation, or at least inspiring me to try, and Neil Strauss's <i>The Game</i>, which gave me hope that I wasn't the crazy one and relationships weren't generally like this}<b> <br /><br /><br />You are a white, English native speaker. You had NO reason to live in poverty in Thailand. Bad choices and a lack character made you a thief.&nbsp;</b><br /><br />The issue wasn't finding work. The issue was keeping it with the crazy ex calling up every place I worked and causing drama. Every job I held in Thailand after I met her, she did this.<b> </b><br /><b><br /></b><b> Why did it take you so long to bail?</b><br /><br />Because at any point, bailing looked like it would have all been for nothing, and it's more appealing to give yourself the reassurance that you haven't wasted your time this way, and that this will be something you'll be stronger for having come through together.<b> </b><br /><b><br /></b><b><br />And the attempted affair crossed the line, I see. Looking back, what are your lessons if any? do you think it was for nothing, or do you feel stronger for it, even though you did not make it together, or both?</b><br /><br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">The lessons, so far;<br /><ul><li>get out of something terrible as soon as possible. When you are alienating people you know and care about, and can't give a good explanation why- especially when you can't explain why and are still blaming yourself- make an objective assessment of your ability to meet the needs of the other person, and their ability to meet yours.<br />&nbsp;</li><li>Telling yourself that 'everything happens for a reason' is probably a symptom that there is no reason you can discern for the things that are happening. Further, something happening for reasons you can't discern is no excuse for you to be unreasonable.<br /></li><li>There is always a way out, there is always a way to survive, there is a solution to every puzzle, even if the solution is killing the puzzle maker. If there isn't, you'll never know, so there's no point in thinking there isn't.</li></ul>also worth noting, I have a much different assessment of my capacity for endurance now than when I went into this relationship. I know my tolerance for pain of different types. I know what I can and will put up with. I know how to survive.<br /><br />So I kind of regard this as fertilizer to make me grow.</div></div><br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">{...} I think it's an important point to make that the affair... well, it wasn't so much that it crossed the line as it was the tipping point of me realizing all the signals I was getting from this other person meant that they were absolutely no longer committed to having a relationship with me. The affair itself is something that, if the relationship were on firm ground, I'd at least have been open to the idea of working past.<br /><br />I'm completely open, now, to at least having a serious discussion about open relationships or polyamory with whoever I am with next- even if I don't decide to engage in these in the future. And this is discussion was explicitly forbidden, even in the context of 'look at this thing, what do you think of it?', and it's kind of jarring to realize that this person- who is demanding to take up your whole world, in a lot of ways- is completely unwilling to give you the same consideration.<br /><br />I think we even had a fight were this dichotomy came up- where I saw what we were going through as a big deal, something changing the course of both our lives, and to her it was just a breakup and not a huge deal.<br />So the realization that I was on the fucked end of a double standard was really the tipping point, more than the affair was.</div></div><br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md"><ul><li><b>Favourite food?</b></li><li><b>Best beverage?</b></li></ul><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">My favorite food to steal?<br /><br />Hmm. I stole packages of uncooked chicken a lot- usually breast meat, sometimes drumsticks, that kind of thing. I stole jars of sauces- things like peanut butter. I stole cheese, usually the cheap locally produced mozarella cheese that local pizza places used. I stole bags of flour and yeast.<br /><br />As far as beverages go, by <i>far</i> the best bang-for-lack-of-buck was with flavoring syrups, such as Hales Blue Boy. With that, you could make your own drinks or flavor carbonated water so it would be a conventional soft drink, Thai people also use it on ice cream- a bit like chocolate syrup in the US. I also stole boxes of loose-leaf tea, which is cheaper and more common there than the tampon-things used in the US. Tea of all varieties is a locally produced commodity there, and so some of the really good stuff was very cheap, and thus 'fair game'.<br /><br /><b>Your story is fascinating. Do you have any photos from when you were really struggling? Or any photos at all, really.&nbsp; </b></div></div></div><div class="md">I'm actually not sure. Right towards the end of this I got a cheap tablet and took pictures of my kids with it, but- for the sake of their privacy- this isn't the kind of thing I'd like to share. I may be able to find some pictures of the house we lived in somewhere online, but I want to restrict that to interior shots only, so that the location of this can remain private- because I suspect my ex still lives there. As bad as the stuff she did was, I really want to keep her out of this, because mental illness is a terrible thing, and I really do pity her, even though at the same time there is much I am unwilling to forgive.</div><div class="md"></div><div class="md"></div><div class="md"></div><div class="md"><br /><b>What ethnicity are you?&nbsp;</b></div><div class="md"></div><div class="md">I'm white. The ex described here is Thai- so my kids are half Thai.</div><div class="md"></div><div class="md"><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md"><b>Did that make it harder or easier to steel? I would think that you would stick out like a sore thumb.&nbsp;</b><br /><br /><b> </b><b>Also, have you see the movie "Brokedown Palace" and, if so, did it ever weigh on your mind.</b></div></div></div><div class="md"><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">I wondered why you were asking this!<br /><br />and on some level, this made things easier- I was less of a 'default suspect'- but also much harder to get away with, if caught, because I would have 'no excuse' in the eyes of anybody who caught me. White people, in the stereotypical Thai mind, are never poor. We're too rich, look at us, how fat we are, and so on.<br /><br />Since nobody is asking about this, I might as well mention, I was very very careful about how I went about this. Most of my stealing was done with technology: I'd hide something from view under a 'shopping list' in a notebook, and then I'd slip it into a laptop bag I always carried- when nobody was looking- from under the notebook. So even if you did see me, you would probably miss this unless you looked for it. and even then, I was very meticulous about how I did this- I never hit the same place so often as to arouse suspicion, I knew where the cameras were and what they could see or not see, I knew the aisles that people spent the least time in that I could slip something away most easily in, and I cataloged countermeasures- like RFID tags, security personnel, etc- so that I could avoid these by default, with little effort.<br /><br />Some of what I did was also behavioral. For example, the only way I was ever able to steal a loaf of bread was by hiding it in a shopping bag from a competing chain of stores- hiding it in plain sight, with other (stolen) groceries as 'camouflage'. In one case, 'browsed' out of a store, into the adjacent store, conveniently 'forgetting' that I had an item from that store tucked in a store ad paper in my hand.<br /><br />My point in saying all of this isn't to brag. These aren't things I'm proud of. But I want people to be able to know about this, so that the people who need to can prevent it. Or, you know, god forbid, somebody who needs to do this to survive can have some idea of how to start.</div></div></div><div class="md"><b>You seem very cool and calculated with how you describe it all. Part of the reason I brought up the movie is I'm wondering how it was effecting you more on an emotional level. What was it like the first few times you stole? What was going through your mind with regard to your family, your personal well being, your feelings of self worth, guilt, fear, anger, anxiety?</b></div><div class="md"></div><div class="md"><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">The most prevalent thought was something along the lines of "Goddamnit, is this all I'm worth?", and then I'd try to rationalize it, or think of ways to come back and pay it all back.<br /><br />I'm not a terribly emotional person, generally. I've got the full range of emotions that I experience, including plenty of regrets and things that I blame myself for. But I prize reason above these things, and being objective, and rational, and so on. So my description takes that color- a deliberately objective account, or as much as I can make it so.<br /><br />And about the movie, no, I haven't seen it. The kinds of movies/media in general that played through my head... well, not much, to be honest. There is one scene from the show Prison Break, where the Hispanic guy (who's name I can't remember, and feel bad about forgetting because he's a good actor)- Scofield's cell mate? that guy!- the scene where he's just found out he's going to be a dad, and he 'robs' a store that he knows the owner of, and his friend reports the crime and he gets arrested, and he watches it all go to hell, and he loses everything, even though the owner of the store wouldn't have pressed charges. That really weighed heavily on my mind.<br /><br />I also didn't take any risks if I was getting freaked out, which did happen numerous times. It's not an easy thing to break an unspoken social contract with your entire species, and that's kind of what it felt like. Like "this is bad for all of us, and I'm just rationalizing it so my own selfish genes can carry on, but that doesn't stop me from recognizing this is bad for me, too".<br />So it's kind of a shitty prospect. I don't know if it feels different stealing other things, if maybe bank robbers get these feelings or whatever. I suspect they don't- the payoff is too big, and the consequences too permanent- but I don't know.<br /><br />Self worth- well, because of this, I began to break that into two categories: Your value and your potential. If you see someone homeless, on the streets, eating out of bins- that person has no value. They have no money, they have nothing invested in the economy we (most of us) live in- but this is a <i>very</i> different thing to saying that this person is 'worthless' or 'not valuable', <b>because of</b> potential. With the right investment, in the right individual, you can get somebody functioning, back up on their own two feet, supporting themselves: and this is valuable, but it isn't new value, you are unlocking the potential value that was trapped in an un-valuable configuration of a person's circumstances.</div></div></div><div class="md"><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md"><b>You seem like a very mentally strong person, I applaud you for that. You don't seem to have any issues with depression (which I feel that I have had in my life). It's a bit inspirational to me, thanks for sharing your experiences.&nbsp;</b><br /><br /><b>Where do you think you'll go from here? More education? Entrepreneurial?&nbsp;</b><br /><br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">I had <i>massive</i> issues with depression. But depression is sometimes a systemic problem in the brain, and sometimes the result of circumstances that are genuinely depressing.<br /><br />So I don't go too much into it, if I can, because it's depressing, but I attempted suicide many times. Sometimes, it just didn't work- and I have no idea why (methods such as intentional pill overdose). sometimes, I was interrupted, sometimes I stopped when I realized nobody would take care of the kids. But the yearning to be in different circumstances was so intense that I'd have done anything, basically. I'd have done myself up in drag to be a girl- or at least a drag queen- because that would have been a vacation from being the 'me' in these shitty fucking circumstances. I'd have crawled around outside naked with a collar on like a dog. I'd have done fucking <i>anything</i> to escape.<br /><br />So I get the feelings of depression. I definitely had them. I also had <i>terrible</i> panic attacks, triggered mainly by things like not being able to meet the needs of my family, or by fear of the next fight with the ex, because she was actively making death threats and saying things like "If I could kill you now and get away with it I would" and so on. It was... well, it makes you numb, to start. and the feeling of realizing that this- this person saying these things- this is the person who you have loved more than any other, and now you have two kids who will not have a perfect family life-<br /><br />These are things that you must be very reasonable when you think of- or at least this is the armor against this that I use. It's easy to think about the lost opportunities, about your kids growing up without both parents in the same house- but it is <i>reasonable</i> to want them to grow up with parents who are separate and who act like decent human beings. It's easy to want to love because you have loved before, but it is reasonable to not love someone who hates you. It's easy to write off mistakes for someone you love, and to forgive them. Less so - but more reasonable - for someone who hurt you on purpose, and who wants you dead.<br /><br />From here, I don't really feel as if I have the opportunity for further education, at least in terms of going to school. This is a luxury I no longer have. So my whole focus right now is entrepreneurial. I am living with my family in the US, and they are running out of money, so my focus is getting myself stable and supported and my kids in a stable life, and then paying them back as I'm able to.</div></div><br /></div></div><b></b><br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md"><b>What type of business did you run? What do you mean by accumulating poverty and outside interference?</b><br /><br /><b> </b><b>How old are your kids? How are they adjusting to living in this country and living without their mother? How was it like for them growing up in the conditions you described?</b><br /><br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">The business... well, it was a B2B supply business, mostly. We sold to end customers sometimes, but our focus was on other businesses. In order to preserve what anonymity I can, I don't want to say what industry we were in.<br /><br />The 'accumulating poverty' was largely caused by irrational 'self satisfying' behavior- she would get depressed, and then cheer herself up by buy something wildly out of our price range, like high-end electronics or, at the most extreme, a car- which we did need, but couldn't afford. All of these things were more highly priced than could be justified- the prices weren't bargained- and when we failed to make payments, they got pawned, or repo'd, and we spent money on trying to get them back, eventually failing- in a vicious cycle that would leave her depressed and seeking a way to cheer herself up.<br /><br />The 'outside influences' is largely in reference to a single individual who we partnered with in our business, who wound up running up large debts- in our name- with our most important suppliers. This made us unable to fulfill orders, it made us late to fulfill them, and the suppliers- who were more familiar with him- took his side a couple times, until we demonstrated that we had paid and he had stolen the money. and even then, he was never kicked out of the picture.<br /><br />My kids are 3 1/2 years old and 1 year old. They're both adjusting well. The conditions they were in before were not great- no climate control (no air con, no heater), just fans, We were constantly short of diapers and didn't have a working washing machine at the end (the one we had died), so my older kid was running around naked, peeing/pooping in a training potty, and I was cleaning him up with the hose (note: instead of toilet paper, thai toilets generally either have a bucket or a hose, you wipe with your hand and water), and same with my younger kid- no buttwipes- but they had diapers, at least. So this is an improvement, the older kid is now fully potty trained and has graduated to underwear from diapers. The younger has started walking, both of them are interacting socially and talking more, they've resumed normal development, maybe even exceeded it. Latest focus is getting older kid in preschool.</div></div><br /><b>How did you steal something as large as a pack of diapers?</b><br /><br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">I would keep it out of view under another item- normally a notebook or sketchbook where I had a 'shopping list' written down- and I would slip things from here into a laptop bag I carried. The sketchbooks were about 10" square, and the laptop is something like 16" x 22" x 4", so there's a decent amount of room in there.<br /><br />The diaper packs, by the way, were all the smallest number of diapers, and I got these from convenience stores, like 711 and Tesco Minimart, so there would be something like 5-10 diapers in a pack.<br /><br /><b>Did you have any near death experiences?</b> </div></div><br />Not that I recognized as such until after. She beat me with a broom handle and left me dizzy enough that I stayed up that night in case I had a concussion. I got in a motorbike accident once and landed face-first in a muddy patch next to the road- she accused me of getting in the accident on purpose to fuck up her new motorbike we couldn't afford. I attempted suicide a couple of times, some of which I'm not sure how I survived. Made exit bags and things like that, I'd wake up with them around my head and a pounding headache, presumably I clawed them open after losing consciousness? I don't know. I hid this stuff from her as well, so I'd be surprised if she saved me.<b> </b><br /><b><br />It seems like its a miracle &lt;you're&gt; alive</b><br /><br />That would be a terrible miracle.<b> </b><br /><b><br />What do you mean your stealing never hurt anybody? Aren't other customers people? You were affecting the prices everybody else paid!</b><br /><br />It was a rationalization. And I don't think it was a bad one, as they go. I didn't get anybody fired. I didn't put anybody else in poverty. I did only what I had to do in order to put food on the table: I stole the cheapest version of anything I did steal, from the establishments that could withstand the losses.<br /><br />So, look. I'm not proud of this. But if I were in this situation again, would I do whatever it took to survive again? You bet your ass I would. I watched my kids go hungry once, and there is no power that will make me inflict this on them again if there is something that can be done to end it, especially when your sole complaint is that something you can afford becomes something you pay more for, but can still afford.<br /><br /><b>Don't you think you should pay back the people you stole from?</b><br /><br />Yes, of course. With interest, to reflect the period of time between their initial loss and their subsequent compensation.<b> </b><br /><br />This is an excellent question, by the way, that opens up the possibility of a conversation about <i>exactly how</i> you might go about paying back a company you spent a substantial amount of time directly stealing from.<b> </b><br /><b><br />What about walking up to the manager, explaining what you'd done, saying sorry, giving them a bag of cash, and walking away?</b><br /><br />It's not a bad place to start, but my first thought with that is that the manager would pocket the cash and tell no one.<b> </b><br /><b><br /></b><b><br />Considering what ground you're standing on at that hypothetical point in time I would question your reluctance to right your wrongs based on the presumption that someone else may do wrong.</b><br /><br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">Let me see if I've got this right... because I stole to feed my children, I think the manager would steal?<br /><br />Well... yes and no. What's more important to me is that I have a better insight, now, into when there is an opportunity to steal with nobody knowing- because this is what I actively did- and this would be creating that opportunity for the manager, with low risk, and with high reward.</div></div><br /><b>&nbsp;have you never been desperate to eat? ever tried living out of bins? sometimes these are the only options people have, you can put whatever morals you like to it, but hitting megastores and large chain super markets is the most moral solution to being that desperate. walk a mile. </b><i>&nbsp;</i><br /><br /><i>{Edit for clarification: this question wasn't directly addressed to me, but I answered it anyway}</i><br /><br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">There were multiple periods of time- I'm not sure how many, but between 5 and 10- all over 2 days- where I went without food in the last year. the longest of these was five days, during which I was fired from a low-skill job (the ex contacted my employer at the time and told them I was spending work time stalking her- which, to be fair, is how I had caught her attempting to have an affair) and also kicked out of my house by my ex for several days, amid accusations of having an affair (which I didn't have, but which she absolutely has coming). The sum total of the cash I had went to paying for a hotel to sleep in. The first day after I was fired, I still brought home food for them- bought, not stolen- but I had nothing for myself, so I spent what time I had perusing help-wanted ads, writing business plans, watching evangelist television, and having panic attacks about this being it, about never getting out of this.<br /><br />So, I don't think I'm on unsteady ground here. I got what free food I was able to. Sometimes friends helped, but the nature of my relationship with the ex alienated a lot of them, so I didn't have many places to turn. I also used what survivalist knowledge I had to get edible plants, vegetables, things like that, but most of this in thailand is deliberately cultivated, so that's stealing too in a lot of cases- so I didn't have a lot of that. And of course what money we did have got spent as frugally as possible- probably more frugally than most people here can imagine. Standard meals, for weeks at a time, would be rice + an egg, or rice porridge (which let us extend the life of a pot of rice rather than waiting for it to go bad) with cheap pickled cabbage in brine with chili peppers. We were able to get some fruit cheaply- mango trees grow everywhere in Thailand, as do banana trees, and so neighbors would sometimes give us mangoes and bananas- and so we were able to make do with this as well, sometimes.</div></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">Other Questions from Other Places</span><i> </i></div><br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md"><b>He says there was "baggage" that led him to getting STD testing early in the relationship but later says she was "not promiscuous" and "definitely not a bargirl" to the point of being "sexually very stuck up and prudish". But, for some reason, she had fluent English, and also spoke Japanese, and managed to catch HIV, somehow.</b><br /><br /><b> </b><b>And she was definitely faithful but apparently caught it after they got together, as they both tested clean after the relationship started. There is a window period, but with current generation tests 95% of people will test positive if they have it within 4-6 weeks of infection.</b><br /><br /><b> </b><b>The whole thing just doesn't really add up, unless she was a IV drug addict. I'm not sure he's giving us the full story.&nbsp;</b><br /><br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">Well, the place to bring this up would have been the thread I started, but anyway, here's what I know.<br /><ul><li>we both tested negative for HIV when we were first together. I saw her test results, she saw mine. She was worried about STD's because her ex had apparently been cheating on her with bargirls, etc. So that's a big part of what the baggage was; not trusting men in general because she'd been betrayed in the past.</li><li><ul><li>it <i>is</i> possible that she was infected at this time and seroconversion- the immune response where antibodies begin to be produced- had not yet happened.</li></ul>&nbsp;</li><li>after this period, she spent a month or two out of town concluding business and getting her things to move to where I was. This is her biggest opportunity to have been infected sexually, but remember that we were in constant contact during this time- talking online at night, calls during the day- so this would have been something she'd have had to work around to do that. and honestly, she had a full plate, and didn't seem to waste any time, and if she'd have found someone else, she could have just gone with them.<br /></li><li>relatively early on in our relationship, she was hospitalized with Dengue fever, at a hospital with a horrible reputation for neglectful incompetent treatment. During this hospital stay, she told me that a nurse had injected something into her hand (where the IV's were attached- they couldn't find the veins in her arms) with a needle that looked like it had already been used. She was paranoid about it being HIV, I calmed her down at the time and told her it was just medicine (I think I was at home when this happened and visited her the next morning, I was at the hospital some nights and at home some nights during this). So, there does seem to be a possibility that she was infected by this. It's also noteworthy that her recovery from dengue was abnormally long, and that her symptoms during recovery neatly coincide with the initial high-viral-load HIV infection, where you get things like rashes, peeling skin, pneumonia, aching bones, and so on.<br /></li><li>It is absolutely possible that I'm just wrong and that she did have chances to cheat that I didn't know of, and that this is what she did. It's important to note, however, that she was in a new town and knew nobody, and she wasn't going out and meeting people. So I consider this unlikely because of reasons like this.</li></ul></div></div><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md"><b>Fair enough, thanks for the reply.</b><br /><br /><b> </b><b>I'd be very sceptical on the "infected by dirty needle" in a hospital possibility. Needle reuse just doesn't happen in Thai hospitals, even eight years ago. And even if it did, she'd still have been very unlucky- it would have to have come pretty much immediately from someone else with HIV (unlikely - prevalence is around 1.5%), the virus dies quickly in the air, and even then the risk of transmission is quite low for an individual incident- under 1%. So you are looking at what, around a 1 in 10,000 chance, (~1% of transmission * ~1% chance it came from a HIV+ patient) <i>if</i> a needle was reused which itself is unlikely. Junkies get it this way because they are already a high risk group, share needles immediately, and keep doing it repeatedly. Not so likely for a single reuse in a hospital - although I'm honestly sceptical that would have occurred in the first place.&nbsp;</b><br /><br /><b> </b><b>That honestly sounds to me like an excuse from her as to how she might have got it, that didn't involve sex.&nbsp;</b><br /><br /><b> </b><b>Can you be sure the results you saw were genuine? In fairness to your point that she might have seroconverted already, I believe the window period before a test would pick up infection was longer eight years ago.&nbsp;</b><br /><br /><b> </b><b>I just wonder given what subsequently transpired with the cheating and the crazy, if you can really trust everything this girl told you.</b><br /><b> </b><b>To be honest I posted here as I didn't want to go clogging up your AMA insinuating that your partner was a bargirl.</b><br /><br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">The crazy was constant, but was made worse by our situation. I really think she had borderline personality disorder- but I'm not qualified to diagnose her as this, this is only my hypothesis.<br /><br />The 'dirty needle' thing was something that, from the description, sounds more like a deliberate infection: done at night, the nurse had tried not to wake her during it, it was a nurse that she described as acting jealous (keep the crazy in mind here: it saw jealousy everywhere), etc.<br /><br />{Edit 11/15: I don't say, but I'm not sure I believe her story here either, but it remains as a possibility that I can't rule out, especially in light of the lack of other opportunities for infection}<br /><br />So, I'm in a pretty good spot to make an assessment of whether she was cheating or not. I kinda suspect she might have done something at the beginning after we met but before we were committed, which I don't hold against her, but after that point I really don't think she had enough motivation or opportunity.</div></div><br /></div></div><b>&lt;Deleted comment along lines of "Why did you stay with her when she got diagnosed as HIV+? You should have just left."&gt;</b><br /><br /><div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container "><div class="md">It's an easy thing to suggest this, but it's harder to do in practice.<br /><br />Remember, I'd already made such a commitment to this person that the fact that they had HIV was something I was happier dealing with than abandoning them to.<br /><br />So you're not wrong. But for stupid unreasonable reasons, it wasn't that simple for me, and I suspect the unreasonable reasons are pretty common elsewhere too.</div></div><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">THE END</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-83590384770308548202015-11-07T16:13:00.003-08:002015-11-07T16:28:06.003-08:00A List of Projects<span style="font-size: large;">The Expletive Project</span><br /><br />The &lt;proposed&gt; name of my startup company, aimed at 'curing' software piracy.&nbsp; The premise is to incorporate piracy into conventional digital supply chains (such as the iTunes Store, or the Steam store, or XBox Live Arcade) in such a way that the peers on the network are compensated for supplying content, and the peers that have content that they haven't paid for yet can have that compensation directed to paying it off for them, before earning normally.<br /><br />Shorter version: You buy "Bananaphone" through this or an affiliated marketplace for $1.&nbsp; $0.80 goes to Raffi, the song's creator, $0.10 goes to the person who sent the song "Bananaphone" from their computer to yours, and the network takes $0.10 to cover infrastructure/overhead costs. This shit aint free, yo. <br /><br />If you are a pirate who didn't buy "Bananaphone" but supply it to 10 people, that goes to paying off your song, and then you get a license and legally own it and can <i>continue</i> supplying it <i>for money</i>.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Terraforming</span><br /><br />Stand-in for better title of a project that has to do with both delivering a basic standard of well-being to all members of our species, and at sufficiently packaging these in such a way as to allow them to be carried in a minimal payload to other planets. The end goal is to enable specific ecosystems that deliver all of the culinary ingredients of specific sets of cultures to be packaged into the space of a standard shipping container. Because whether I'm living on Mars or an Asteroid, sometimes I'm going to want some pizza and some fucking Chinese food, and once those become permanent settlements, I'm going to need to make that stuff there.<br /><br />The end goal of this project is a sufficiently compact block of technology that can reproduce itself, which fits inside of a 20 foot (8 meter) shipping container, which can be dropped anywhere on any planet that will not destroy it utterly, which can then- over a period of weeks or months- develop sufficient habitats, closed or open, to sustain human life.&nbsp; The proposed test case of this is to use these to kick-start agriculture in notoriously inhospitable regions of the world, such as Somalia.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Faith Healing</span><br /><br />A project aimed at documenting the madness of religion, so that it can be demonstrated to subsequent generations. While it should not be taken as an indictment of the pious, the statistical correlation between educational accomplishment and an unwillingness to believe fairy tales has been duly noted. Part of this effort is aimed at recording human rights abuses by religious organizations or explicitly in the name of religious reasons, for the use in obtaining justice- whenever it becomes possible, as it usually is not under the sort of regimes it currently occurs under.<br /><br />The end goal of this project is to give every government in the world the tools to fight crimes committed in the name of faith, to record all of these possible to bring their perpetrators to justice, and to provide a support and resistance network to the secularists at the mercy of the people committing these crimes, and those against whom direct threats have been made.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Terminatrix</span><br /><br />An artificial intelligence project, aimed at across-the-board reimplimentation of the logical systems at work behind the human mind in the neurotypical population, with some practical additions to allow practical usage of this system for applications such as distributed manufacturing, dynamically adaptive 3D printing, and robotic transportation.<br /><br />The end goal of this project is functional and useful AI capable of performing tasks such as driving your car, building your house, fighting your wars, and folding your laundry, and also capable of networking ("sharing data") between different instances of the program, to increase the rate at which the network can respond to and overcome new obstacles.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">WikiWeapon</span><br /><br />I've designed guns for years as a hobby, and with the new 3D printed guns and the way that they seem to inevitably point, I want to make sure that the safest and post practical versions of these are available as soon as possible, so that less safe and effective versions don't cost needless lives. Also, because the ability to manufacture a firearm is the test of a manufacturer's capabilities, the project is designed to expand on that and let the gun makers also make, eg, transportation and agricultural tools. Because gun-making doesn't have to make you an evil dick.<br /><br />The end goal of this project is to develop a set of printable precision machining tools that can be printed and made from off-the-shelf components, sufficiently sophisticated and precise to allow the manufacture of a firearm or any other tool or instrument requiring such precision at the available scale of the printing platform.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Superhouse</span><br /><br />This is a project aimed at providing a basic standard of housing with little or no energy input requirements.&nbsp; The basis for this project is the body of work surrounding the Earthship project, and the intent is to make this as adaptable and flexible as the human species residing in it needs it to be.&nbsp;<br /><br />The end goal is an adaptive set of blueprints for small-scale residential buildings ("houses") that can be built anywhere, using local materials, with minimal investment and off-the-shelf components to deliver climate control, power, water, some amount of food, sewage treatment, and basic automation and basic professional services (printing, network storage, 3D printing, manual labor automation, etc).Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1422104333580623963.post-5445994551648084742015-11-01T11:05:00.000-08:002015-11-01T14:53:46.707-08:00Welcome.This is my first post on this blog. I've created it to keep a log of my own efforts, to record my previous adventures, and to store my thoughts on topics I consider interesting, important, useful, entertaining, or otherwise worth keeping.&nbsp; Most of the posts will be in English, but unless I get some sort of traumatic brain injury, not all of them will be.<br /><br />My name is Kendall Meade. I'm 29 years old, a single dad, an atheist, a former missionary.&nbsp; In the course of my life, I have nearly become maritally engaged on accident, I've had coffee with warlords to discuss the logistics of arming their troops, I've cofounded and run a business that- as far as I can tell- seems to have changed a whole economy, and I have been an illegal immigrant.&nbsp; I've been at the receiving end of an abusive relationship, I have worked with displaced people from the longest running civil war in history, and worked with orphans who's family members had died of HIV, and with marginalized tribal groups from all around southeast Asia.<br /><br />I've translated portions of the Bible, and studied it formally. I've worked in industrial photography labs. I've ghost-written a master's thesis.<br /><br />All of which I'd like to eventually catalog here, along with thoughts about my current efforts- notably a startup that I think can 'cure' digital piracy, and my thoughts on recording, reporting, and taking action on human rights abuses, especially by or in the name of totalitarian theocracies.<br /><br />I hope this is interesting for you, but the primary point is for me to have these stories written down and organized, so that hopefully I can begin filling in the gaps between them.Kendall Meadehttps://plus.google.com/100370503390383888368noreply@blogger.com0